One comment that I hear often from perspective is that they are not statisticians so they would never need to, or be able to, use our statistical features. However, my reply is commonly that they are, in fact, the exact type of person, who should learn about these features. This is because the statistics built-in to TIBCO Spotfire allow you to use them without having a statistics background, while still being able to leverage powerful statistics in your analysis.
For example, let’s say you are interested in analyzing either your stock portfolio, or stocks that you may want to purchase and add into your portfolio. You can use a Line Chart to show the trend for the adjusted closing price for your stocks over the past six months, as shown below:
You can then either use the filter panel to show one stock at a time in the Line Chart, or you can trellis the Line Chart by stock symbol, as shown below:
This is a useful visualization, but what if we had hundreds or thousands of these stocks we wanted to look at? What if we specifically we wanted to find stocks which consistently ascending over the past 6 months.
We could try to visualize the trends, but the more stocks we have the harder that would get. We could write some S+ or R statistics model to figure this out, but most users are not statisticians. Luckily, Spotfire has a variety of built-in statistical tools which will provide you with the power of statistics without the need to be a statistician to use them.
In this scenario, we will use the Line Similarity tool with a Correlation similarity calculation to find the stocks which are most similar to an Ascending pattern.
This will output a column, which ranks the stocks on how close they are to the ascending line. We can then use the resulting column filters to isolate the stocks which are most similar to this Ascending ideal.
Interested in learning more about the multivariate analytic capabilities of TIBCO Spotfire? Consider taking our brand new course : SP142 Multivariate Data Analysis with TIBCO Spotfire
