Binning – Performing Advanced Analysis

Binning

Binning is much like grouping except it’s for numbers and dates. It’s a way to turn continuous numbers into categorical fields. You create a bin by right-clicking on the numerical or date field you want to bin and selecting New group, just the same as for a categorical value.

Figure 13.9 – Binning your numbers

Once the Groups dialog box opens, you will see a couple of changes. Group type will be Bin, not List, and you can choose your bin type. You can either force your numeric field into a fixed number of bins or you can choose how many elements go into each bin.

Figure 13.10 – Net revenue forced into 10 bins

Both binning and grouping let you create summarized data that is easier to digest.

Figure 13.11 – The same data from Figure 13.10, but without binning

Tip

Be careful of smoothing out your data into too few bins. Too few bins and you may miss some peaks and valleys in your data.

Now that we have learned all about grouping and binning, let’s move on to another key visual element that Power BI has, key influencers.

Key influencers

The key influencers visual is another helper visual that will help you analyze your data to determine which fields in your data influence others. For example, your sales data may also include customer demographics such as household income or employment status. Using the key influencers visual, you may come to find out that household income may be a factor that influences the total sales per customer. This visual performs statistical calculations in order to show the results and will typically require configuration to your data for best results.

The key influencers visualization can be found in the Visualizations pane. Once you have added it to the report, you start by selecting the field you want to analyze. You can then add one, or preferably more, fields to Explain by.

Figure 13.12 – The key influencers visualization explaining how much each factor impacts net revenue

Your report consumers can click on each category and get a breakdown of not only how much it impacts your chosen metric, but also what parts impact it. We’ll now explore another visual similar to the key influencers one, that is, the decomposition tree visual.