Date:         Thu, 8 Sep 2005 11:28:20 +0930
Reply-To:     kylie.lange@flinders.edu.au
Sender:       "SPSSX(r) Discussion" <SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Kylie Lange <kylie.lange@flinders.edu.au>
Subject:      importing PRELIS correlations
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Hi all,

I have a user who has is calculating polychoric correlations is PRELIS
(part of LISREL) and then using those as a correlation matrix input to
SPSS' factor analysis procedure. At the moment he takes the text output
from PRELIS and uses Excel to get it into SPSS' matrix format. This is
fiddly for large correlation matrices so he would ideally like a way to
directly import the text output into SPSS via syntax.

The PRELIS output comes as a single line (no line breaks). For example:

0.10000D+01 -0.25278D-02  0.10000D+01  0.23427D+00 -0.58275D-01
0.10000D+01   0.48736D-01  0.54267D-01 -0.21431D+00  0.10000D+01

It also uses PRELIS' own version of scientific notation, with
0.10000D+01 = 1.0000. The PRELIS output represents the lower half of the
correlation matrix, reading each row from left to right. So -0.25278D-02
is the correlation between x2 and x1. The ideal end result would be a
SPSS data file with the same structure that the below syntax gives:

matrix data variables = rowtype_ x1 x2 x3 x4.
begin data
mean  0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
stddev 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
n 100 100 100 100 100 100
corr      1  -0.0025278  0.23427  0.048736
corr      -0.0025278  1    -0.058275  0.054267
corr      0.23427   -0.058275  1  -0.21432
corr      0.048736   0.054267   -0.21432   1
end data.


Does anyone have any suggestions of where to start with this?

Thanks,
Kylie.