Day 1 - Team E

Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods. Business analytics is used by companies committed to data-driven decision making. The domain encompasses enterprise decision management, predictive science, strategy science, fraud analytics, credit risk analysis, marketing analytics, and so on.

SPSS is a computer program used for survey authoring and deployment, data mining, text analytics and statistical analysis. SPSS datasets have a 2-dimensional table structure where the rows typically represent cases such as individual names and the columns represent measurements such as age or gender. Only 2 data types are defined: numeric and text (or string). But it is advisable to have the data in numeric form. To change the string data into numeric one would have to do coding.  

The user has two views which can be toggled by clicking on one of the two tabs of the SPSS window, which are “Data view” and the “Variable view”. The Data View shows a spreadsheet view of the cases and variables. Unlike excel spreadsheets, the data cells can only contain numbers or text and formulas cannot be stored in these cells. The Variable View displays the dictionary where each row represents a variable and shows the variable name, variable label, value label(s), width, measurement type and a variety of other characteristics. The Missing column indicates those values for which there was no data such as an option of “Not Applicable’. Cells in both views can be manually edited to define the file structure.

Values can be broadly defined into Category Variable and Continuous variable. An example of category variable is ‘Age groups’. Continuous variables can be further classified into ‘Continuous continuous’ and ‘Discrete continuous’. There are 3 types of measures: nominal, ordinal and scale.

A variable can be treated as ‘Nominal’ when its values represent categories with no ranking and there is no particular order; for example, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore can be randomly ranked as 11, 22 and 33.

A variable can be treated as ‘Ordinal’ when its values represent categories with some intrinsic ranking; for example, ranking cities on the basis of their population.

A variable can be treated as ‘Scale’ when its values represent ordered categories with a meaningful metric; for example, ID of an employee.

Procedure to test Chi square is, click Analyse > Descriptive Statistics > Crosstabs. Then transfer one of the variables into the "Row(s):" box and the other variable into the "Column(s):" box.

After which click on Statistics and select the "Chi-square". Chi-square is a statistical test commonly used to compare observed data with the expected data according to a specific hypothesis. It is always tested against the null hypothesis, which states that there is no significant difference between the expected and observed result.

By
Ankita Kunwar
Nikhil Malhotra