Combine Categories Wizard: Summary Type

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The first step in the wizard allows you to choose which way to combine the categories into the new summary variable.

The four ways that are supported are:

Rules Based

Rules Based Creation is useful if the variable to be grouped have codes that can be split into sections such as XXXYYY-ZZZZ with a fixed number of characters for each code.  The Rules based creation allows you to specify a variable group based on the first n characters of the code.  For example, if you have a "sort formatted" postcode sector variable it will have the format (not including special London codes) : AADDS

The first two characters are the Postcode Area (i.e. "CV"), the second two are the Postcode District (i.e. "34") and the final character is the Postcode Sector (i.e. "5").  If you use Rules Based Creation then you can create a Postcode Area grouping by grouping everything with the same first 2 characters together.

Freeform

Freeform Based Creation is useful If you are grouping a variable whose codes don't have a fixed patten as you can manually specify which codes from the source variable will be grouped together.  For example, you could approximate a Gender variable from a person's salutation by manually grouping Mr into a Male group and Mrs and Ms into a Female group.

From File

Create From File is useful when you want to perform a manual (freeform) grouping and you have a file that specifies the how to group the variable.  For example, you could perform a grouping with a file that grouped each postcode into either England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.  You can use either delimited or Fixed file formats.

From Threshold

Create from Threshold allows you to use a threshold or Top N calculation to determine the categories created.

 

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