Posts Tagged ‘Cognos’

Recently while waiting for a flight, I had the opportunity to review “Driving Business Insight with Effective BI Strategy” (April 30, 2012) from Forrester, a global research and advisory firm. The article reminds that a business (any business) cannot survive today by relying on ERP systems and spreadsheets. In fact, it goes further and proposes that […]

          Since Cognos TM1 uses a very efficient data compression algorithm to allow large datasets to fit in relatively small amounts of RAM, TM1 calculates the values only when needed by TM1—resulting in improved performance and reduced storage requirements. Here is the sequence of events: A value is requested from (a […]

Dummy Coding with IBM SPSS To understand what is meant by dummy coding, you need to understand 2 forms of data: Qualitative or Quantitative? “Qualitative data describes items in terms of some quality or categorization while Quantitative data are described in terms of quantity (and in which a range of numerical values are used without […]

  Chi-Squared Challenging using SPSS A Chi-Square Challenge (or Test) procedure organizes your data pond variables into groups and computes a chi-square statistic. Here is the specific definition: “The chi-square (chi, the Greek letter pronounced “kye”) statistic is a statistical technique used to determine if a “distribution of observed frequencies” differs from the “theoretical expected […]

There are various types of windows in IBM SPSS Statistics: The Data Editor Window – used to manage your data pond. The Viewer Window – where all results of your data analysis are displayed. The Chart Editor Window – here you can change the colors, select different type fonts or sizes, switch the horizontal and vertical […]

The Frequencies command is one of the simplest yet one of the most useful descriptive techniques.  Its objective is to simply sum the number of instances within a particular category. For example, the following questions could be easily answered: How many males and females make up my data pond? What are the number of ethnic […]

Computing New Variables IBM SPSS Statistics offers more than 70 built-in functions to compute new variables based on your corporate logic. These include: • Arithmetic functions • Statistical functions • Distribution functions • Logical functions • Date and time aggregation and extraction functions • Missing-value functions • Cross-case functions • String functions   These functions […]

Ranking A ranking is a relationship between a set of items such that, for any two items, the first is either “ranked higher than”, “ranked lower than” or “ranked equal to” the second. – Wikipedia   Ranking in SPSS Statistics IBM SPSS Statistics ranks cases in your data pond by automatically defining new variables to […]

A  codebook is a type of document used for gathering and storing codes. Originally codebooks were often literally books, but today codebook is a byword for the complete record of a series of codes, regardless of physical format. – Wikipedia The codebook command was introduced in IBM SPSS Statistics version 17. It provides information about the […]

The power of SPSS allows the data scientist or predictive modeler to consume large data volumes. This data may come in smaller manageable subsets or possible huge “data ponds”.  Depending upon the procedures you will be performing in your analysis, SPSS may reread the entire data set for each procedure.  Of course, procedures that change […]

Getting Started…Again Back to Statistics; I restart IBM SPSS and from the startup/open dialog, locate my previously defined data file from the “Open an existing data source” list and click OK. My file opens in the data editor (just as I left it) and the Statistics Viewer shows the very first transaction “GET” (and then […]

Last time I mentioned IBM SPSS collaboration and deployment services and promised to talk more about it – so here we go: Analytical Assets Organizations positioning themselves to take full advantage of analytics will look to separate the effort of developing analytical assets and actually using them – between “creators” and “consumers”.  Generally speaking, an […]