Our data scientist has been writing about her lifelong love affair with Microsoft Excel (see link below). But even she will admit that Excel is not up to the job of outlier detection. This is what she says:
“Unless your data consists of one column only, most of the advice to Excel users online is totally unhelpful. Business users who have Excel skills and an outlier detection problem can search the internet, but what they will find is either inadequate recipes in Excel or material that is far too deep into data science and academic theory.
Outlier detection (or anomaly detection, if you prefer) is one of the thornier data science problems. It typically requires multiple algorithms, different approaches depending on whether the data is multivariate or time series, and serious computing power. No Excel user would want to wait for their computer to do the number crunching required. So, what makes a lot more sense is to offload all that work, and that is our operating model at Penny Analytics. We serve the Excel user, by literally serving the Excel user results rather than headaches.”
Are you looking for an outlier calculator on a single numeric variable? Then all you need is something like this.
Are you an Excel user who needs the power of data science? Learn more about Penny Analytics.
Article on Medium about loving Excel
