The Basics of Using IBM SPSS Modeler

The previous chapter introduced the notion of data mining and the CRISP-DM process model. You learned what data mining is, why you would want to use it, and some of the types of questions you could answer with data mining. The rest of this book is going to focus on how you actually do some of the aspects of data mining—reading data, exploring variables, deriving new fields, developing models, and so on. However, before we can get started with these different data mining projects, we first need to become familiar with the software that we will use to work on the data. In this chapter, you will learn the following:

• Get an overview of the Modeler interface
• Learn how to build streams
• Get an introduction to various help options