[vox-tech] Re: vox-tech Digest, Vol 14, Issue 10

[Norm Matloff]

> From: hajhouse at houseag.com (Henry House)
> Subject: [vox-tech] Statistical software
> 
> A visitor to the demo at the Davis Food Co-op this weekend asked about
> software for statistical analysis and mentioned SPSS. Since I do most of my
> statistical analysis in Gnumeric and do not use a dedicated analysis
> program, I was not able to mention a comparable application for Linux. What
> do you use? I later found out about Gnu PSPP, supposed to be a Free clone of
> SPSS --- does anyone use this?

In my opinion, as someone with a background in both CS and statistics
(I'm a former statistics professor), R is the best package, either open
source or commercial.  (I even consider it a little better than S-Plus, a
commercial product which it is closely related to.)  It is statistically
correct (which arguably SPSS is not), and it is a general programming language,
something people on this list can relate to.  

I have a quick mini-tutorial on R at

   http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/r.html 

Since I myself will be using R heavily during the next couple of weeks,
I probably will be making frequent additions to the tutorial.

Norm