Visual Binning

Visual Binning is designed to assist you in the process of creating new variables based on grouping contiguous values of existing variables into a limited number of distinct categories. You can use Visual Binning to:

• Create categorical variables from continuous scale variables. For example, you could use a scale income variable to create a new categorical variable that contains income ranges.
• Collapse a large number of ordinal categories into a smaller set of categories. For example, you could collapse a rating scale of nine down to three categories representing low, medium, and high.

In the first step, you:

1. Select the numeric scale and/or ordinal variables for which you want to create new categorical (binned) variables.

Optionally, you can limit the number of cases to scan. For data files with a large number of cases, limiting the number of cases scanned can save time, but you should avoid this if possible because it will affect the distribution of values used in subsequent calculations in Visual Binning.

Note: String variables and nominal numeric variables are not displayed in the source variable list. Visual Binning requires numeric variables, measured on either a scale or ordinal level, since it assumes that the data values represent some logical order that can be used to group values in a meaningful fashion. You can change the defined measurement level of a variable in Variable View in the Data Editor. See the topic Variable measurement level for more information.