Book Image

IBM SPSS Modeler Essentials

By : Jesus Salcedo, Keith McCormick
Book Image

IBM SPSS Modeler Essentials

By: Jesus Salcedo, Keith McCormick

Overview of this book

IBM SPSS Modeler allows users to quickly and efficiently use predictive analytics and gain insights from your data. With almost 25 years of history, Modeler is the most established and comprehensive Data Mining workbench available. Since it is popular in corporate settings, widely available in university settings, and highly compatible with all the latest technologies, it is the perfect way to start your Data Science and Machine Learning journey. This book takes a detailed, step-by-step approach to introducing data mining using the de facto standard process, CRISP-DM, and Modeler’s easy to learn “visual programming” style. You will learn how to read data into Modeler, assess data quality, prepare your data for modeling, find interesting patterns and relationships within your data, and export your predictions. Using a single case study throughout, this intentionally short and focused book sticks to the essentials. The authors have drawn upon their decades of teaching thousands of new users, to choose those aspects of Modeler that you should learn first, so that you get off to a good start using proven best practices. This book provides an overview of various popular data modeling techniques and presents a detailed case study of how to use CHAID, a decision tree model. Assessing a model’s performance is as important as building it; this book will also show you how to do that. Finally, you will see how you can score new data and export your predictions. By the end of this book, you will have a firm understanding of the basics of data mining and how to effectively use Modeler to build predictive models.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Help options


When using Modeler, at some point we are going to need help. Modeler provides various help options.

Help menu

The most intuitive way to get help is to use the Help menu. As seen in the following figure, the Help menu provides several options:

  • Help Topics takes you to the Help System, where you can search for various topics
  • CRISP-DM Help provides an introduction to the CRISP-DM methodology
  • Application Examples offers a variety of real-life examples of using common data mining techniques for data preparation and modeling
  • Accessibility Help informs users about keyboard alternatives to using the mouse
  • What's This changes the cursor into a question mark and provides information about any Modeler item you select

Dialog help

Perhaps the most useful help option is to use context sensitive help, which is available in whatever dialog box you are currently working on. For example, let's say that you are using the Var. File node and you either did not know how to use this node or you were unfamiliar...