IBM SPSS Statistics vs. Mu Sigma muRx vs. RapidMiner

I described earlier that the only scenarios where I use SPSS are those where we have legacy projects that were developed in the late 90s or early 2000s using SPSS, and for some reason, the project (data set, scope, etc.) hasn't changed in 24+ years. This counts for 1-2 out of around 80 projects that I run. Whenever possible, I actively have my team move away from SPSS, even when that process is painful.

Incentivized

RapidMiner is really fantastic to perform fast ETL processes and work on your data as you want, no matter what is the source. You will really save a lot of time when you learn how to use it. You can create mining analysis with several algorithms, and thanks to add-ons, you can apply a lot of techniques. It will not replace a business intelligence dashboard but it allows to create great datamarts for your BI tools. One negative thing is that It's no easy to share your outputs.

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

• I am very impressed at how easily you can work within RapidMiner without much data analytics training. Plus with the help of the crowd, you can see what steps others have taken with their data analytics projects.
• Text mining was simple and clean. We used this for our call transcription problem where we didn't have the resources to listen to each call. We needed to qualify each call based on some key phrases.
• Our direct mail program was large and not very targeted. Using RapidMiner, we were able to isolate a predictive level we felt comfortable with and decided not to send to anyone below that level. We saved quite a bit of money.

Incentivized

• collaboration - SPSS lacks collaboration features which makes it near impossible to collaborate with my team on analysis. We have to send files back and forth, which is tedious.
• integration - I wish SPSS had integration capabilities with some of the other tools that I use (e.g., Airtable, Figma, etc.)
• user interface - this could definitely be modernized. In my experience, the UI is clunky and feels dated, which can negatively impact my experience using the tool.

Incentivized

• I hope RapidMiner would be the first data science platform that allows data scientists to change the behaviour of a machine learning algorithm that already exists in the repository. For example, I want to be able to change the way a genetic algorithm mutates.
• Automatic programming: One day, I hope RapidMiner can automatically generate codes in any 4th generation programming language based on the developed model.
• More tutorials/samples needed: Why doesn't RapidMiner becomes the next 'UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository'? Provide real examples and real cases for users to study and understand the best practices in modelling. RapidMiner already has some datasets for a tutorial. Besides the existing samples, I hope RapidMiner can provide more sample data and examples.

Incentivized

Both
money and time are essential for success in terms of return on investment for any kind of research based project work. Using a Likert-scale questionnaire is very easy for data entry and analysis
using IBM SPSS. With the help of IBM SPSS, I found very fast and reliable data
entry and data analysis for my research. Output from SPSS is very easy to
interpret for data analysis and findings

Incentivized

Very fast and user-friendly tool

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Probably because I have been using it for so long that I have used all of the modules, or at least almost all of the modules, and the way SPSS works is second nature to me, like fish to swimming.

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Very use to use and learn

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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

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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.

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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

I have used R when I didn't have access to SPSS. It takes me longer because I'm terrible at syntax but it is powerful and it can be enjoyable to only have to wrestle with syntax and not a difficult UI.

Incentivized

We tried different data tools and we figured we give RapidMinder Studio a shot as one of our employees had experience with it, and when compared to some of the other tools that we used it was the best fit among the test group that we used. Overall it was a little more fluid and user-friendly.

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

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• 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

• Thanks to the patters that RapidMiner has detected, we have been able to follow clues in the right direction, both for the Protein Interaction Network Analysis and for the Epilepsy Research
• Students and participants of the machine learning workshops have learned about this technology and about the tool

Incentivized