multiple discriminant analysis spss code

This is due to Type I error.ĭiscriminant analysis helps researchers overcome Type I error. If there’s a large number of independent variables, there may be differences between groups that are a result of chance where there really are no differences. This means that there’s a possibility that a series of one-way ANOVA’s will show that many of the independent variables maintain group means that are significantly different, when in actuality only one or two non-redundant independent variables do. Oftentimes, in practical market research, the independent variables - in this case the brand-rating scales - are correlated to some extent. Due to the fact that these group assignments can be obtained in any way, discriminant analysis is often performed alongside cluster analysis.įurther, if the objective of a researcher is to understand how the groups or items at hand differ, the researcher could conduct a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) on each independent variable, such as a brand attribute rating scale, across the group means. It’s essential to remember that in both of these cases, some group assignments must be known before conducting the statistical procedure. Predictive discriminant analysis is used when researchers want to assign objects to one of a number of known groups of objects. Predictive Discriminant Analysisĭiscriminant analysis can be used for descriptive or predictive objectives.ĭescriptive discriminant analysis is used when researchers want to assess the adequacy of classification, given the group memberships of the object under study. These situations are where discriminant analysis serves as a powerful research and analysis tool. Market researchers are continuously faced with situations in which their goal is to obtain a better understanding of how groups (customers, age cohorts, etc.) or items (brands, ideas, etc.), differ in terms of a set of explanatory or independent variables. For this reason, it’s often leveraged to compliment the findings of cluster analysis.

When To Use Discriminant Analysisīy performing discriminant analysis, researchers are able to address classification problems in which two or more groups, clusters, or populations are known up front, and one or more new observations are placed into one of the known classifications based on measured characteristics.ĭiscriminant analysis is also used to investigate how variables contribute to group separation, and to what degree. In order to perform any kind of discriminant analysis, you must first have a sample within these known groups. In other words, discriminant analysis is used to assign objects to one group among a number of known groups. Discriminant analysis is a versatile statistical method often used by market researchers to classify observations into two or more groups or categories.

Multiple discriminant analysis spss code