SPSS Developer Central News

Posted By Jon Peck on Oct 07, 2009 at 09:10 AM
Filed Under Developer Central News, IBM SPSS Statistics, Programmability, Python, R, SPSS Statistics v17 | Leave a Comment

Well, now that SPSS is part of IBM, I suppose we will need a new name for Developer Central and this blog.  In the meantime, though, here is news about recent items on Developer Central.

  • With the release of Version 18 of IBM SPSS Statistics and the Developer product, easy-to-install versions of the Python and R materials are posted.  In particular, look for the R Essentials link on the main page or from the Plugins page.  It installs the R Plugin, the correct version of R, and a bunch of example R integrations as bundles.  It’s much easier to get going with this now.
  • The spssaux2 module has a new function, setMacrosFromData that reads columns in the active dataset and creates macro definitions from them.
  • The SPSSINC TRANS extension command is available.  It makes it easy to run a standard or user-written Python function to transform the case data just about the way you would if the function were built in to the regular SPSS transformation system.  (I’ve written about that in an earlier posting here.)
  • In connection with this, the extendedTransforms.py module has several new functions and some tweaks to make it work well with SPSSINC TRANS.  The new functions are mode and multmode for calculating the mode across variables within a case, packDummies and extractDummies for packing values of dummy variables into bits of a single variable and extracting them out later, and translatechar for mapping a set of characters in a string into another set of characters.
  • Albert-Jan Roskam has contributed a module named state.py that will prune unused variables out of a dataset.
  • The SPSSINC MERGE TABLES and SPSSINC CENSOR TABLES extension commands now run much faster.  (I profiled them and found a few scripting apis that were unexpectedly slow and changed the code to minimize their use).  If you have V18 the speedup is even greater, taking advantage of some improvements in that version.  MERGE TABLES also has some convenience tweaks that make it easier to merge significance tests from Custom Tables into the main table.  V18 has another way to do this built into the CTABLES command, but some people prefer the older style of the tables.
  • The SPSSINC TRANSLATE OUTPUT command is available.  It provides a framework for translating the outline and pivot table text for languages where we don’t already provide a translation.
  • The customstylefunctions module included with the SPSSINC MODIFY TABLES extension command has some new custom functions.  You can now move around rows, columns, and layers by using moveRowDimension, transpose, moveLayersToColumns, moveLayersToRows, moveColumnsToLayers, moveRowsToLayers, moveColumnsToRows, and moveRowsToColumns.
  • The Programming and Data Management book and the article on writing extension commands have been updated for version 18.

All of this material is free once you have the SPSS base product.

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