UNIFIED ENVIRONMENT FOR DATA PRODUCTION AND DATA ANALYSIS

Ismo Horppu and Pasi Koikkalainen

Laboratory of Data Analysis University of Jyväskylä
P.O.Box 20, FIN-35851 Jyväskylä
Finland

Currently there is only limited software support for statistical editing and imputation. Most software systems are experimental and not designed for generic data production.

In this presentation we demonstrate a software that has been build on the top of our NDA (Neural Data Analysis) software platform. New methodology for data editing and imputation has been implemented in the software kernel, and a new user interface has been build to support the tasks of data editing and imputation.

The software is an attempt to implement a typical data production process (DPP) as done in official statistics and industrial data management. We consider that this is defined by the following requirements.

a)

Software should support data manipulation, reorganization and visualization. These are common tasks in any type of data analysis.

b)

Use of external knowledge, such as edit rules, must be supported. We have done this with a simple rule converter that translates edit rules to NDA type of expressions.

c)

Variable selections and case spesific edit/imputation operations should allowed. The user should be able do them with minimal effort.

d)

Several methodologies for editing and imputation must be supported.

e)

Experimenting and playing with data should be easy.

f)

There should several tools to evaluate the results of editing and imputation.