Hi, I am working on a company initiative to replace an external statistical modelling contract with the internal resources to handle the same. I would be very grateful for any recommendations of the appropriate software we need to acquire for this purpose. I'll describe the sort of modelling we are doing:
We are trying to predict the behaviour of stores (customers), this behaviour being binary - either they do what I'll call 'x' or they do not. Sampling has been done to determine which stores do and which don't and we have database information on all these sample stores (as well as all our other stores). What we want to do is predict x using all the information in our databases so as to be able to target a reduction of x. If we randomly select stores to speak with them we have a 10% chance of them being a store that does x. We'd like to increase this percentage using a model that produces a decision tree based on all the factors such that stores get grouped according to type , e.g. if factor "A" >10,000 Then.......If factor "B" >35 days then a store is in category 17 which is likely to exhibit x. With this sort of modelling you would need to be able to specify weightings since there is a tradeoff between identifying every store with behaviour x and the accuracy of prediction. I assume we simply need some software that handle multiple regression very capably. But perhaps there is a more specific description of what we are trying to do. The external contractor we are using at the moment is using SAS but we need something Windows-based (not Unix). Price is not really a factor and we will only use it for the data analysis described. So I have two questions really - what do you call the statistical process I have described and what software would be recommendable to use for it? Appreciate any advice, Robert . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
