Introduction to key influencers

Trend Analysis in Power BI

Maarten Van den Broeck

Content Developer at DataCamp

What are "key influencers"?

Definition

Explanatory variables which cause a significant change in the characteristic of a target variable.

Use Cases

Determine major drivers of a metric
Compare the relative importance of variables
Explore relationships between a target and another variable

¹ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/visuals/power-bi-visualization-influencers

What are "key influencers"?

A box plot showing the distribution of average monthly income by career tenure. More senior, or tenured, employees have a larger (i.e. higher on the y-axis) median.

What are "key influencers"?

A scatter plot showing job level on the x-axis and monthly income on the y-axis. The data points are colored by the respective job roles. There is a upward, increasing, slope in the trend line.

Key influencer visualization

An example of the Power BI Key Influencers visualization with a bar chart showing average monthly income by job role. On the left are a list of key influencers.

Key influencer visualization

An example of the Power BI Key Influencers visualization with a bar chart showing average monthly income by job role. On the left are a list of key influencers.

Reasons why key influencers are not found

- Problem: explanatory fields have too many categories

Action: transform variable into categories

- Problem: there aren't enough observations to derive patterns

Action: increase the sample size or find new data

- There are simply no key influencers

Action: explore other explanatory variables

Let's practice!

Trend Analysis in Power BI