The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) is a software package used in statistical analysis of data. It was developed by SPSS Inc. and acquired by IBM in 2009. In 2014, the software was officially renamed IBM SPSS Statistics. The software was originally meant for the social sciences, but has become popular in other fields such as health sciences and especially in marketing, market research and data mining.
The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences is a widely used program for statistical analysis in social sciences, particularly in education and research. However, because of its potential, it is also widely used by market researchers, health-care researchers, survey organizations, governments and, most notably, data miners and big data professionals.
Aside from statistical analysis, the software also features data management, which allows the user to do case selection, create derived data and perform file reshaping. Another feature is data documentation, which stores a metadata dictionary along with the datafile.
Statistical methods usable in the software include:
- Descriptive statistics — Frequencies, cross tabulation, descriptive ratio statistics
- Bivariate statistics — Analysis of variance (ANOVA), means, correlation, nonparametric tests
- Numeral outcome prediction — Linear regression
- Prediction for identifying groups — Cluster analysis (K-means, two-step, hierarchical), factor analysis
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