it_user7365 - PeerSpot reviewer
Other non-IT at a non-profit with 501-1,000 employees
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Review of IBM SPSS Text Analytics for Surveys
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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it_user1068 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user1068Tech Support Staff at a tech company with 51-200 employees
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Course on STAS - I was totally new in using this program back in 2008. I took a course that lasted approximately three months. Although this SPSS program seemed somehow difficult at first, it was not in the long run. For those without knowledge of this software can take up a course. However, I believe it is a program that anyone who is determined can learn how to use on their own without spending a dime on training materials. Thank you Ashley for sharing with us these extensive tips on STAS.

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CB
Consultora asociada especialista en Ciencia at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
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Very flexible with a short learning curve
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable features are the small learning curve and its ability to hold a lot of data."
  • "I would like SPSS to improve its integration with other data-filing IBM tools. I also think its duration with data, utilization, and graphics could be better."

What is our primary use case?

My primary use cases are statistic analysis and data governance.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features are the small learning curve and its ability to hold a lot of data.

What needs improvement?

I would like SPSS to be integrated with Cloud Pack For Data

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for fourty years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This product is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This solution's scalability is good.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was very simple and took only a day or two.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Licenses are available on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs, everything is standard.

What other advice do I have?

This is a very flexible product that can be used for numerous purposes. It's also very easy to teach others to use it. I would rate this solution as ten out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Senior Research Analyst at a university
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​Custom tables and macros allow us to create useful reports quickly for a broad audience
Pros and Cons
  • "Custom tables and macros: They allow us to create useful reports quickly for a broad audience."
  • "Better documentation on how to use macros."

What is most valuable?

Custom tables and macros: They allow us to create useful reports quickly for a broad audience.

How has it helped my organization?

We can provide internal benchmarks that allow specific units to compare themselves to others and the whole organization.

What needs improvement?

  • Scripts are clunky to work with.
  • Better documentation on how to use macros.
  • More affordable training for new staff members.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it for 17 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Some of the versions have issues. It is not always made public that a “fix” is available. Many hours can be wasted thinking you have something wrong in your code when it really is an issue with the newest version.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I have used SPSS with 100,000 records. At that point, it was reaching its limit. Processes would not run, or would run incompletely. I am told for very large files, SAS may be better, but I have not confirmed this.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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it_user7362 - PeerSpot reviewer
Other non-IT at a aerospace/defense firm with 51-200 employees
Vendor
IBM SPSS Text Analytics - Any Good? Yes.

I recently discovered that IBM bought SPSS a few years ago and is now providing a Text Analytics package called IBM SPSS Text Analytics for Surveys (producing the acronym STAS, which is either a stats package or an STD). I thought I'd take it out for a test drive so I downloaded a 14 day trail version. Before using, I reviewed these excellent tutorials: Analytics Blog and RTI's SurveyPost blog.

For data I could have used their sample data, but I decided to download my Twitter archive. Unfortunately, this caused me some pre-processing hassle. You see, STAS is technically designed for survey data and it expects unstructured language to be in the form of comment responses to questions and it expects those comments to be stored in single cells within a column in a spreadsheet (I see no reason in principle why it couldn't used for analyzing any unstructured data. You just have to package the data in a format SPSS will accept, namely a spreadsheet with the unstructured data all in one column).

Also, STAS does not directly ingests CSV files or Open Office ODC files. Apparently it only accepts inputs of four types: its own file type, Excel, ODBC, and what they call “Data Collection” which I haven't investigated.

Once you open a file, you are asked to drag-and-drop the column name containing your language data into an "Open Ended Text" box (refer to Analytics Blog for screen shots). While I appreciate the simplicity of the drag and drop functionality, my Twitter data had tokens separated into separate columns (which I thought was weird. Let me do my own tokenization, please!). STAS' functional choice means I needed to pre-process my data files. I had to merge the many token columns containing language tokens into a single column. Document pre-processing is common in language analysis, but STAS is supposed to be a platform easy to use for non-engineers. These file ingest and pre-processing steps are tedious and uninteresting and exactly why most people get frustrated. These things can be automated and it is a platform like STAS that ought to be doing this for me.

Also, it seems to only ingest a single file at a time. My Twitter data came to me separated by month so I have 38 files. I can manually merge them, but more work for me. Really no reason STAS can't let me select multiple files all formatted identically, then merge if necessary.

I was surprised and impressed that the software immediately offered me an opportunity to translation non-English comments with a single click. Simple and easy. Quality is what it is with MT. Don't blame STAS if it's a crappy translation. No matter how you slice it, it's a great function. Kudos.

I was super impressed that it will crawl the data and suggest code categories like key concepts. This is essentially topic modeling (though not as sophisticated as something like LDA. The User Guide has a whole chapter devoted to describing the details, but I haven't had time to dig in yet). Color coded clusters of concepts is a very nice function. Colors seem to refer to entity types (Person,. Org, etc). You can collapse all concepts into just the key exemplars of each cluster. There are also several nice filtering options to help you understand what your data is centered around. Here's a screenshot of my final output:

I can see key concept frequencies and filter by that. That's nice. Next steps: Can I see simple word frequencies? Ngrams?

Sentiment analysis can be done with respect to specific categories (food + positive). Pretty easy, but SPSS should mitigate lay people's over-indulgence in sentiment analysis which is tricky and not as easy as this makes it looks. This is where making something easy backfires. How can STAS encourage double checking the data? Gold Standards, sampling, etc.

No doubt, this is easy to use. An academic has the luxury of ignoring people who don't want to learn command line tools or programming languages, but the businessman does not. There's a ton of language data out there owned by thousands of companies and those companies are never going to get their regular employees to learn R just to analyze it. For them, STAS is a legitimate tool that will actually allow the average employee to dig into unstructured data. That's a win.

*In the interest of full disclosure: I do not work for IBM and this is not a sponsored blog in any way. These thoughts are entirely my own. I once worked for IBM briefly over 5 years ago and I still get the occasional IBM recruiter contacting me about opportunities, but this is my personal blog and all content is my own and reflects my honest, personal opinions.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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YG
Advanced analytics at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
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Straightforward to set up, stable, and it is quick to build statistical models
Pros and Cons
  • "You can quickly build models because it does the work for you."
  • "The technical support should be improved."

What is our primary use case?

Once it is installed it does an important job because it helps with long statistical analysis processes.

What is most valuable?

You can quickly build models because it does the work for you.

What needs improvement?

The technical support should be improved.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using IBM SPSS Statistics for one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This is a stable product.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This product is scalable and there are three versions. There is a smaller version, a mid-level, and there is a full enterprise version. The licensing can make it difficult to deploy models although it should be possible with the enterprise version. However, I have never tried it.

How are customer service and technical support?

The technical support is not very useful. You can find help on the internet but if you really have a problem then it can take a while before you get a solution.

How was the initial setup?

The setup is pretty straightforward and I think that you can easily set up your own connection.

What about the implementation team?

My client performed the setup.

What other advice do I have?

Overall, I like this product and I don't have any major things that I would like to change.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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VÃ
Lead Consultant at Caligo
Consultant
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Good machine learning algorithms and statistical models, but technical support needs to be more responsive
Pros and Cons
  • "Some of the most valuable features that we are using with some business models are machine learning algorithms, statistical models given to us by the business, and getting data from the database or text files."
  • "Technical support needs some improvement, as they do not respond as quickly as we would like."

What is our primary use case?

The primary use case of this solution is for collecting business data and reporting to upper management. Also, I am creating some regulatory and ad-hoc reports.

What is most valuable?

Some of the most valuable features that we are using with some business models are machine learning algorithms, statistical models given to us by the business, and getting data from the database or text files.

The current features meet with the needs of our company. Our needs are not complex for the features offered.

What needs improvement?

There are some scheduling issues that created some complex flows. Creating a simple scheduling mechanism would be an improvement for this tool.

Technical support needs some improvement, as they do not respond as quickly as we would like.

The price is too expensive so they should consider reducing the cost, make it more competitive.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This solution is stable, we have not had any issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have not scaled this solution as it is sufficient for us.

We have one hundred people using this solution. Most are IT, consultants.

How are customer service and technical support?

We have contacted technical support two or three times and they don't respond quickly.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

We did not use a vendor team to implement this solution. We did it ourselves.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We think that IBM SPSS is expensive for this function.

What other advice do I have?

In this field, there are some open-source products such as KNIME that may be useful for our purpose, because it lessens the costs.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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it_user6549 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Expert at a university with 501-1,000 employees
Vendor
Predictive modeling and auto-model are valuable but IBM does not handle our support queries very well

For how long have you used this product?
- Three years

Which features of this product are most valuable to you?
- Predictive modeling, and its best feature is auto-model, it will give you options on which models are best suited to your data such as CHAID, c5 or Logistic REgression, it also displays accuracy, another good feature is that it has boost and reduce data for replication (else you will have to rely on sample power) for power analysis

Can you give an example of how this product has improved the way your organization functions?
- Yes, we predicted enrollment of our students more accurately

What areas of this product have room for improvement?
- pricing maybe

Did you encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability?
- It's definitely scalable since its integratable with SQL Server or a flat database file like excel

Did you previously use a different solution and if so, why did you switch?
- We haven't used any since Predictive analytics software is very expensive

Before choosing this product, did you evaluate other options? If so, which ones?
- We used this product this it was parallel with SPSS data sets of which most psychology and stat backgrounds use since its very usable in terms of user interface, its not much based on syntax unlike other software available.

How would you rate the level of customer service and technical support?
- Customer service and technical support is given by STRAND asia, however I would say IBM is not that good in handling our queries.

Was the initial setup straightforward or complex? In what ways?
- It became complex since IBM bought SPSS 4 years ago.

Did you implement through a vendor team or an in-house one? If through a vendor team, how would you rate their level of expertise?
- Through a vendor team

What is your ROI on this product?
- No ROI involved

What advice would you give to others looking into implementing this product?
- IBM SPSS modeler is good to integrate with IBM Cognos, make sure though that you have your data warehouse set up properly, there is also R and Python integration, you can download R essentials (32 bit and 64 bit) to work with R nuggets, definitely a big plus (imagine open source and the power of IBM to bring in a powerful and yet flexible software)

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Manager of Data Analytics
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Merge, Aggregation, and Crosstabs functions are valuable for data preparation
Pros and Cons
  • "It has helped our analyst unit deliver work with more transparency and confidence, given that we can always view the dataset in totality, after each step of data transformation."
  • "The learning curve to using this product is not steep. The program is appropriate for those who do not have a lot of background in programming, yet have to perform basic statistical analysis."
  • "Needs more statistical modelling functions."

How has it helped my organization?

It has helped our analyst unit deliver work with more transparency and confidence, given that we can always view the dataset in totality, after each step of data transformation.

What is most valuable?

  • Merge, Aggregation, and Crosstabs functions are most valuable when I'm performing data preparation.
  • Statistical modelling functions within this product, such as Regression and PCA function, are also useful. 
  • The point-and-click interface is user-friendly.

What needs improvement?

Needs more statistical modelling functions.

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Not applicable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Not applicable.

How is customer service and technical support?

Good.

How was the initial setup?

Setup was straightforward. My IT support helped me with the setup; it was quick.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Our licence is on a yearly renewal basis. While pricing is not the primary concern in our evaluation, as products are assessed by whether they can meet our user needs and expertise, the cost can be a limiting factor in the number of licences we procure.

What other advice do I have?

The learning curve to using this product is not steep. The program is appropriate for those who do not have a lot of background in programming, yet have to perform basic statistical analysis. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Buyer's Guide
Download our free IBM SPSS Statistics Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: March 2024
DOWNLOAD NOW
Buyer's Guide
Download our free IBM SPSS Statistics Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Buyer's Guide
IBM SPSS Statistics
March 2024
DOWNLOAD NOW
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