Re: RECODE, CHISQ issues, and other feedback

[John Darrington]

On Sat, Apr 14, 2007 at 09:08:09PM -0700, address@hidden wrote:
     Her professor gives her data files in SPSS format, which I've been able 
     to load with pspp, but one of the datasets has a string format column, 
     which I need to make numeric.  I've done a recode in both the psppire 
     gui and by cli with RECODE (CONVERT) and it's just setting the value to 
     zero for everything.  RECODE is also missing all the THRU src constructs 
     for the recode mapping.  CONVERT doesn't seem to be "useful" at the 
     moment.  What worked for me was to do ('   1'=1) etc. maps, for all 
     values that were strings that needed to be cast to NUMERIC.

Can you post a bug report, giving a small example of syntax which
illustrates these problems.
     
     I REALLY don't think people should have to pay the gobs of money they 
     charge for SPSS, so if you guys need any coding to fill in the gaps, let 
     me know.  I'll probably be submitting some patches, at least to fix up 
     RECODE to at least match the manual's claims for what it does.  I looked 
     at the source code to figure out why THRU wasn't working (being 
     unimplemented), so I'm already in the code.  I might work on THRU, 
     CONVERT, and single-factor chi-square is broken, even though passing 
     multiple factors into it seems to work.  CROSSTABS /CELLS=... doesn't do 
     what I expect, either.

Any patches would be welcome.  If you fix a bug, please accompany the
patch with a test for that bug, like the ones you see in tests/bugs/*.sh

     Also, the HTML driver for CROSSTABS is outputting nonsense for 
     the chi-square tests compared to the ASCII layout for some reason I 
     haven't looked into.

Again, a test case showing these problems would be very useful.  You
can also use NPAR TESTS to perform chi-square tests, if CROSSTABS
doesn't do what you want.
     
     The GUI seems good for displaying data, but I haven't bothered using it 
     to do any syntax creation -- just using straight command-line and the 
     texinfo manual.  It seems sparse at the moment, but a good start.

Indeed, at the moment it is sparse.  It's also buggy.  But it's there
for people to comment on.
     
     Oh, and maybe you guys can hang out in the #pspp channel on freenode 
     where it says you are but nobody actually idles?
     
I'm there sometimes, but not 24x7.

     BTW, how far along are people with the framework needed to 
     implement ANOVA?

Oneway anova is already implemented in the ONEWAY command.  Hopefully
there'll be an implementation of GLM soon ...


Thanks for your feedback.

J'

-- 
PGP Public key ID: 1024D/2DE827B3 
fingerprint = 8797 A26D 0854 2EAB 0285  A290 8A67 719C 2DE8 27B3
See http://pgp.mit.edu or any PGP keyserver for public key.

signature.asc
Description: Digital signature