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

Selecting cases


Often during a data mining project, you will need to select a subset of records. For example, you might want to build a model that only includes people that have certain characteristics (for example, customers who have purchased something within the last six months). The Select node is used when you want to select or discard a subset of records based on a specific condition. Let's go through an example of how to use the Select node:

  1. Open the Cleaning and Selecting data stream.
  2. Click on the Record Ops palette.
  3. Double-click on the Select node so that it is connected to the Var.File node.
  4. Right-click on the Select node, then click Edit:

The Select node allows users to specify an expression either directly in the Condition text box or with the Expression Builder (the calculator icon). The Mode option allows you to choose whether to select (Include) or delete (Discard) records that satisfy the condition.

Note

You can type the selection criteria into the Condition textbox, but it is often...