[vox-tech] Statistical Software

[Sameer Verma]

Norm Matloff wrote:

>>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), 
>
Ni Norm,
Can you speculate on why SPSS is not statistically correct? I have 
rarely used SPSS (I use SAS), but curiosity just killed the cat :-)

>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.
>
>  
>
Looking forward to the tutorial.

Sameer

-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Asst. Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/