IBM SPSS Statistics vs. RapidMiner

SPSS is well-suited for the following: 1) User Behavior Analysis: SPSS handles large datasets to analyze user behavior data. 2) Customer Satisfaction / Foundational Surveys: SPSS facilitates analysis of quant data from satisfaction surveys, keeping us informed about customer needs and preferences. 3) A/B test analysis: SPSS statistical tools for A/B test analysis, which helps optimize user experience of our products. Scenarios where SPSS are less appropriate: 1) Qualitative Data Analysis: I do not use SPSS for open-ended survey responses/qual data. 2) Live/in-vivo data analysis: SPSS is not ideal for real-time data processing. 3) Complex Data Integration: SPSS isn’t the best fit for complex data integration tasks

Incentivized

RapidMiner is the best tool to build models on textual data. It is rich in ML algorithms and reduces the need to manually tune the parameters. It automatically optimizes them, thus providing a better solution. RapidMiner again extends great capability for data preparation, its insane connections to almost every data source pulls in the data easily into one environment. And it can comfortably perform data cleaning and process tasks over that. RapidMiner is not so good with image, audio or video data. These data points cannot be used directly in their raw form. They must be transformed into some intermediate form for performing analytics over it. Moreover, there are no connectors to directly pull data from their varied sources. For example, we don't have a connector to read audio data directly from a switch and then convert it to text (although Google speech API is available for audio to text conversion.)

Incentivized

• SPSS has been around for quite a while and has amassed a large suite of functionality. One of its longest-running features is the ability to automate SPSS via scripting, AKA "syntax." There is a very large community of practice on the internet who can help newbies to quickly scale up their automation abilities with SPSS. And SPSS allows users to save syntax scripting directly from GUI wizards and configuration windows, which can be a real life-saver if one is not an experienced coder.
• Many statistics package users are doing scientific research with an eye to publish reproducible results. SPSS allows you to save datasets and syntax scripting in a common format, facilitating attempts by peer reviewers and other researchers to quickly and easily attempt to reproduce your results. It's very portable!
• SPSS has both legacy and modern visualization suites baked into the base software, giving users an easily mountable learning curve when it comes to outputting charts and graphs. It's very easy to start with a canned look and feel of an exported chart, and then you can tweak a saved copy to change just about everything, from colors, legends, and axis scaling, to orientation, labels, and grid lines. And when you've got a chart or graph set up the way you like, you can export it as an image file, or create a template syntax to apply to new visualizations going forward.
• SPSS makes it easy for even beginner-level users to create statistical coding fields to support multidimensional analysis, ensuring that you never need to destructively modify your dataset.
• In closing, SPSS's long and successful tenure ensures that just about any question a new user may have about it can be answered with a modicum of Google-fu. There are even several fully-fledged tutorial websites out there for newbie perusal.

Incentivized

• RapidMiner Studio offers a superb user interface with an intuitive workflow paradigm that is very easy to learn.
• RapidMiner Studio’s operators make it a complete and powerful tool for data preprocessing, data visualization, and data mining/analytics.
• RapidMiner Studio provides excellent documentation, countless worked examples, training and support via a large user community.
• Every problem is solved using a sequence of operators.
• Statistical analysis capabilities offered with the T-Test, ANOVA, Grouped ANOVA, and ANOVA Matrix operators.
• Textual data mining operators.
• Web-based and cloud computing capabilities.
• Visualization capabilities.
• Marketplace Extensions – especially Finance And Economics.
• Process portability.

Incentivized

• Lots of finicky work to do simple tasks
• Usability is atrocious [in my opinion]. No ability to customize.
• Would love to see product enhanced with interpretation features or citation tools (e.g., report results APA style)
• Bulk editing variables would be an improvement
• UI looks like its straight out of AOL days

Incentivized

• Wish the tool was more efficient in terms of processing power. The tool takes a lot of CPU processing power, even for a small process on a small data set
• Wish there were more options on charts and graphs to visualize the data

Incentivized

It's super easy to use for newbies and super powerful for power users! It does EVERYTHING you are usually asked to do analytically. Their Help Desk is PHENOMENAL. And I find the upgrade and renewal price to be a good deal.

Incentivized

Very fast and user-friendly tool

Incentivized

SPSS is beginner friendly and user-friendly for beginner analysts and simple statistical tests. It's "click and go" interface does take some learning, but overall this is much easier than other programs I have used and seen. Compared to SAS software, SPSS takes a great deal less familiarizing and it not a matter of learning a coding language like SAS and RStudio.

Incentivized

Very use to use and learn

Incentivized

SPSS can tend to crash when I am trying to do a lot of data. This can slow me down when I need to do a lot of data

Incentivized

SPSS does the job, but it can be slow. I do have to plan a lot of time to get through a huge amount of data.

Incentivized

I have not contacted IBM SPSS for support myself. However, our IT staff has for trying to get SPSS Text Analytics Module to work. The issue was never resolved, but I'm not sure if it was on the IT's end or on SPSS's end

Have a plan for managing the yearly upgrade cycle. Most users work in the desktop version, so there needs to be a mechanism for either pushing out new versions of the software or a key manager to deal with updated licensing keys. If you have a lot of users this needs to be planned for in advance.

Incentivized

If you have made it this far, you should have a very good idea of how SPSS stacks up the competition (data processing and analytics tools). Even the free ones, such as r Studio or Stata, are leaps and bounds ahead of SPSS. IBM is resting on a reputation developed nearly 30 years ago and has shown no desire to improve.

Incentivized

The other product like RapidMiner Studio that I have used is WEKA. I decided to use RapidMiner because almost all modelling methods and feature selection methods from the Weka machine learning library are available within RapidMiner. Furthermore, RapidMiner Studio is a visual workflow and therefore it is easier to demonstrate and visualise the processes involves in getting the desired results. Visualization of workflow enhances teaching and learning. RapidMiner is rich with algorithms and online learning materials that can assist students in their self-directed learning on data preparation, machine learning, deep learning, text mining, and predictive analytics. Moreover, RapidMiner repository has more than 1500 machine learning algorithms and functions that students can explore for any case study and assignments. The RapidMIner is also an open platform that can seamlessly integrates with other applications programmed with other programming languages like R and Python.

Incentivized

I am neutral because I have not had to look into scalability since I am using as a student.

Incentivized

• I found SPSS easier to use than SAS as it's more intuitive to me.
• The learning curve to use SPSS is less compared to SAS.
• I used SAS, to a much lesser extent than SPSS. However, it seems that SAS may be more suitable for users who understand programming. With SPSS, users can perform many statistical tests without the need to know programming.

Incentivized

• We saved over $100k on our direct mail program by not mailing to those unlikely to respond to our mailings based on our predictive analysis.
• Our CX team has saved countless hours by automating call scripts to isolate key phrases and code each call.

Incentivized