Maybe this would be better on the pspp-dev list, but it comes up every so often. I added the support (with a lot of hand-holding by John Darrington) for /PRINT to the Quick Cluster and I intended to add /SAVE as well. Adding /PRINT was not very hard, but adding /SAVE will require that your students not only know C but also understand how PSPP manages data (which makes sense, you need to add a new variable to the dataset). I was going to model the QC /SAVE off the /SAVE feature implemented for regression. I'm sure that's possible, but it was less straightforward than I'd hoped and required more effort than I had at the time.
Another issue for me was that the full gui pspp (i.e., PSPPIRE) cannot be compiled on the Linuxes I typically use (CentOS 6 and 7). It looks like Fedora 28 could do it if you can install the GNU spread-sheet-widget (it's not clear, because configure said it needed Cairo 1.5 but F29/F29 only have 1.15, but the errors ceased as I installed more dependencies); John Darrington wrote the spreadsheet widget, so maybe he could help you. I haven't been following the thread, but that package is available in Debian unstable. I think most of the PSPP developers use Debian unstable.
Of course, you can always compile it without a gui and run it on the command line. That works great for me, but I guess most pspp users only use the gui.
So, I don't want to discourage you (quite the opposite), but your students would need to be comfortable with these issues. If they were comfortable with these issues, I'm sure they could add this feature as a class project in a semester. It's a fairly small amount of code.
One other thing: I had to go through an assignment/disclaimer process to assign my copyrights; I guess your students would have to do so as well. They would, obviously, have to agree to this and they should start that process near the beginning of the semester because it took about a month for my form to be processed and executed.
-Alan
I find PSPP very useful, and I'm sure it can be a perfect substitute for SPSS (and many other packages) in its current procedures.
I do have one suggestions which I'd think shouldn't be that hard to solve. While there is a command to Save Zvalues in the Descriptives procedure, there is not a Save command which would be extremely useful in other procedures. Factor (save factor scores), Quick Cluster (save cluster membership) Logistic Regression (save predicted, and save probability). Particularly, the save cluster membership is mandatory, given that we run the procedure to assign elements to groups. I fin there is a Print command that does a similar task, so saving a new variable should not be that hard.
I have other suggestions that I presume involve a much harder task, regarding additional procedures available in current SPSS versions: Hierarchical Cluster, Discriminant Analysis, Correspondence Analysis, and Decision Trees.
¿Are this tasks too hard to cover, or do you think a small team of students could do the job as a class project in the course of a semester?
--
_______________________________________________ Pspp-users mailing list address@hidden https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-users
-- Alan D. Mead, Ph.D. President, Talent Algorithms Inc. science + technology = better workers http://www.alanmead.org "You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other." -- Carl Sagan, Contact