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

Sorting cases


At times it is useful to see if any values look unusual. The Sort node arranges cases into ascending or descending order based on the values of one or more fields. It also helps in the optimization of other nodes so that they perform more efficiently:

  1. Place a Sort node from the Record Ops palette onto the canvas.
  2. Connect the Select node to the Sort node.
  3. Edit the Sort node.

You can sort data on more than one field. In addition, each field can be sorted in ascending or descending order:

  1. Click on the Field Chooser button.
  2. Select Age in the Sort by: fieldbox.
  3. Click OK:

We will now rank the age cases in ascending order (the youngest people will be at the top of the file and the oldest people will be at the bottom of the file):

  1. Click OK.

Now let's take a look at the results from the Sort node:

  1. Connect the Sort node to a Table node.
  2. Run the Table node:

Notice that there are no longer any children in this file, as the youngest people in the dataset are 18 years old.