Using Excel and SPSS to Analyze Customer Data: A Case Study | Smile Clinic

1. Identify and critically evaluate the current trends in data warehousing, business intelligence and data mining.
2. Demonstrate a comprehensive knowledge and systematic understanding of essential concepts and principles by using predictive analytic software.

Part 1

Using the Superstore data set provided, determine the decline in sales/profits over the years, and evaluate the use of Excel for pre-processing the data, analysing the data and visualising the data. You will also need to demonstrate how you can do this practically with the use of any one of Excel functions such as: IF, LOOKUP, PIVOT TABLES, charts and graphs.

Part 2

You are an intern at Nutritionist centre ‘Smile clinic’, who has been tasked to analyse customers data to see whether they eat rice in their daily meal for health and nutrition reasons. The clinic has a copy of Microsoft Excel and has just downloaded a free copy of the open source SPSS data mining software. The company has used Microsoft Excel before but not SPSS.

You need to produce a report giving an evaluation on how many customers of the Smile Clinic do eat rice. How many customers are Male and Female? Also, what is the Mean and Median of the ages in the data. Further, what is the Mean & Median of participants that do eat rice. Show findings on Pie, Bar or Histogram charts.

Using the smile provided in conjunction with SPSS, give a specific example of clustering (i.e.: K-means). Show your workings with screenshots and explain your findings.

Explain the most common data mining methods that can be used in business with real world examples.

You will need to discuss the advantages/disadvantages of SPSS over Excel. This should be a mix of theoretical arguments as well as practical arguments.

1. Processing the data, analysing the data and visualising the data
2. Data mining & analysis