Definition(en): SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) is a software package used for statistical analysis in the social sciences. The first version of SPSS was developed by SPSS Inc. in 1968 and has since had eighteen stable version releases. In 2009 SPSS Inc. was acquired by IBM. As of version 17.0.1 SPSS software has been known as Predictive Analytics Software. SPSS is used widely by both academics and other social researchers. SPSS creates an SPSS Output File which represents data in a two dimensional format where the rows are used to represent case values such as a place or personal name and the columns are used to represent measurements such as age or GDP. SPSS Output File is a proprietary file format. From SPSS version 16 and onwards the SPSS Output File has an .spv suffix. There is no backward compatibility for files generated by previous versions of SPSS.