About the Authors
Keith McCormick: Keith moved to Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, in the late ’90s planning on graduate school, but a “part time” SPSS training job turned out to be a career. Keith has been all over the world training and consulting in all things SPSS, statistics, and data mining. Several thousand students later, hopefully, he has learned a thing or two about how to get folks started in SPSS. These days, he splits his time between doing SPSS Statistics and SPSS Modeler work, teaching others how to do it, and writing about how to do it. Periodically, he puts the latest news on his blog at KeithMcCormick.com. In between assignments, Keith likes to travel to out-of-the-way places, try new food, hike around, and find cool souvenirs to bring home.
Jesus Salcedo: Jesus is QueBIT’s Director of Advanced Analytics Training. Previously, he worked for IBM SPSS as the SPSS Curriculum Team Lead and as a Senior Education Specialist. He has been using SPSS Statistics for 20 years. He has many years of teaching and consulting experience and has taught statistics and data mining to thousands of students using both SPSS Statistics and SPSS Modeler. He earned a PhD in psychometrics from Fordham University. In his free time, Jesus enjoys playing baseball, hiking, and traveling.
Aaron Poh: Aaron is a management and technology consultant working with federal and commercial clients. His experience ranges from IT strategy and enterprise architecture development to organizational design and business process reengineering. He holds a master’s degree in engineering management from Duke University and a BS in biomedical engineering and applied mathematics from Johns Hopkins University. An active participant in various leadership roles, he strives to impact the organizations and people around him in a positive way. Aaron is a self-motivator and enjoys developing creative solutions to further organizational success and promote positive cultures and campaigns. In his free time, he loves to travel and experience new cultures and foods.
Dedication
To all the “legacy SPSS” folks we’ve known, and worked with, over the years, some of whom are at IBM now, and some of whom have moved onto other things.
Authors’ Acknowledgments
We owe our thanks to Meta Brown for introducing us to the team at John Wiley & Sons. Amy Fandrei stewarded the book for the third time and helped us overcome obstacles along the way. Thank you, Amy. We would also like to thank our editor, Elizabeth Kuball; our technical editor, Shannon Johnston; and the rest of the For Dummies team.
We would like to thank all our friends and colleagues at IBM SPSS.
Keith and Jesus would like to thank Aaron for his contributions. Without him, we couldn’t possibly have been ready in time for the Version 23 release. We’re proud that this book is absolutely up to date with the latest and greatest, and Aaron helped us get it done.
Finally, we owe a debt to Arthur Griffith, who wrote the first and second editions. Although we never had an opportunity to meet Arthur, his presence is felt in these pages. Just when we might risk taking ourselves too seriously, we stumble upon a phrase of Arthur’s featuring “diddlysquat” or a software illustration using jelly beans. His wonderful sense of humor has been retained whenever possible in the revision, since we couldn’t possible replicate it.
Publisher’s Acknowledgments
Acquisitions Editor: Amy Fandrei
Project Editor: Elizabeth Kuball
Copy Editor: Elizabeth Kuball
Technical Editor: Shannon Johnston
Production Editor: Vinitha Vikraman
Cover Image: © iStock.com/3alexd