Good Statistical Packages

[rab at nauticom.net]

> On Tue, 22 Mar 2005, Alexander Volovics wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Mar 21, 2005 at 05:11:55PM -1000, Ping-Wu Zhang wrote:
>>
>>> Could anyone recommend any good statistical package(s)?  Does anyone
>>> know whether there is any SPSS or SAS clone?  Thanks.
>>
>> If the license fee is not an objection ($615.00 for single user
>> with Base Documentation Set) I highly recomend Stata:
>> http://www.stata.com/
>> Maybe you can get you company/institute or university dept. to order it
>> for you. It is a bit easier to master than R and still cheaper than SAS.
>
> If the license fee is not an issue, I beleive that SAS is available for
> Linux as well (although Alexander may be correct about the relative cost).
>
>>
>> However the advice depends on what you need it for.
>> Any package can produce simple summaries, graphs and the classical
>> analyses. However if you need things like certain random effects models
>> you might only be able to find the necessary tools in SAS for
>> example. (Programming something yourself in R is not very enjoyable).
>>
>> Alexander
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
>  		Matthew Saltzman
>
> Clemson University Math Sciences
> mjs AT clemson DOT edu
> http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
>
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Both SAS and SPlus are available for Linux. If you want the best
statistical software used by professional, then you should instead use R:

http://www.r-project.org/

IMO, it is far better (and more natural) for doing statistical analyses
compared to the very old technology in SAS. R command line driven with
excellent graphics and is almost identical to Splus but is open source.
There is a lot of documentation on-line and a number of published books
available. Also, there are hundreds of add-on packages. R also interfaces
well with latex and even OpenOffice (e.g., for creating tables). The
"foreign" package makes it easy to import data from other packages (like
SAS, SPSS, Minitab, Stata, Splus, etc.). You can also import Excel
spreadsheets (which are not recommended for storing data but people use
them anyway).

Rick B.