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 and performing a conversion on a complex stream


In this example we have data from a call center in the Philippines. The managers at the call center want to determine the call volume between midnight and 8 AM so they can staff the call center accordingly. To get this information, there is a timestamp variable that indicates the time when the customer called and the time zone where the customer was located (in this case all customers are in the Pacific time zone). Now there are two wrinkles in this timestamp variable. First, the timestamp variable does not have a constant string length. This variation in position makes it more difficult to extract the actual times because we cannot just specify to extract all characters between position x and position y. Second, even though all customers called from the Pacific time zone, some called during Pacific Standard Time and others during Pacific Daylight Time, and in the Philippines this time change does not occur, so we'll need to add an...