Book Image

IBM SPSS Modeler Cookbook

Book Image

IBM SPSS Modeler Cookbook

Overview of this book

IBM SPSS Modeler is a data mining workbench that enables you to explore data, identify important relationships that you can leverage, and build predictive models quickly allowing your organization to base its decisions on hard data not hunches or guesswork. IBM SPSS Modeler Cookbook takes you beyond the basics and shares the tips, the timesavers, and the workarounds that experts use to increase productivity and extract maximum value from data. The authors of this book are among the very best of these exponents, gurus who, in their brilliant and imaginative use of the tool, have pushed back the boundaries of applied analytics. By reading this book, you are learning from practitioners who have helped define the state of the art. Follow the industry standard data mining process, gaining new skills at each stage, from loading data to integrating results into everyday business practices. Get a handle on the most efficient ways of extracting data from your own sources, preparing it for exploration and modeling. Master the best methods for building models that will perform well in the workplace. Go beyond the basics and get the full power of your data mining workbench with this practical guide.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
IBM SPSS Modeler Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Parsing nonstandard dates


The KDD98 data set uses a YYMM date format, which is not one of the supported date formats in Modeler. In this recipe we will use Derive nodes to parse the existing date information and reassemble it into a supported format. In this recipe we will extract the month portion of information contained in a variable that combines the month and year in a string. The starting stream has already addressed the year information. We will modify the stream so that it also addresses the month information.

Getting ready

We will start with the Parsing Nonstandard Dates.str stream, which uses the cup98lrn reduced vars2.txt data set.

How to do it...

  1. Open the Parsing Nonstandard Dates.str stream.

  2. Run a preview of the Derive node. Scroll to the far right of the table to see the new variable, and then edit the Derive node. The variable is the Year_str variable. Note that the original variable, DOB, has the two-digit year on the left, and the two digits for the month on the right of a four...