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

Introduction


This chapter focuses on just the first task, Select, of the data preparation phase:

Decide on the data to be used for analysis. Criteria include relevance to the data mining goals, quality, and technical constraints such as limits on data volume or data types. Note that data selection covers selection of attributes (columns) as well as selection of records (rows) in a table.

Ideally, data mining empowers business people to discover valuable patterns in large quantities of data, to develop useful models and integrate them into the business quickly and easily. The name data mining suggests that large quantities of data will be involved, that the object is to extract rare and elusive bits of the data, and that data mining calls for working with data in bulk—no sampling.

New data miners are often struck by how much selection and sampling is actually done. For some, the stereotypical data miner dives in and looks at everything. It is unclear how such an unfocused search would yield...