Comments on: Open Source Stats Programs?

By: Bookmarks about Programs

Bookmarks about Programs — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 02:30:19 +0000

[...] – bookmarked by 3 members originally found by webrm on 2008-08-26 Open Source Stats Programs? http://www.mikesplanet.net/2008/07/open-source-stats-programs/ – bookmarked by 3 members [...]

By: Vadim P.

Vadim P. — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:41:42 +0000

My statistics course at university was also taught using R.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:56:38 +0000

Yes: I am a statistician by education and I can seriously say that R (http://www.r-project.org/) is the most prominent statistical software suite around, regardless whether the competitors are commercial or open source ones. CRAN (the CPAN-comparable) repository) contains almost anything you can imagine; all packages are based on research. The community is active and mostly academic; many involved people are known names within the scientific statistical community.

Learning curve can be a little deep, but it is all worth it. Also: unlike others, I would recommend not to use GUIs for R.

Finally, also Gretl (GNU regression, Econometrics and Time-Series Library; http://gretl.sourceforge.net/) can handle all basic regressions, including logistic ones, easily.

By: Firas MR

Firas MR — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:46:19 +0000

Hi there. I was exploring different stat programs a while back myself and just realized that many if not most of them use different programming languages at the very core. SPSS uses a proprietary language and by extension unique commands and syntax afaik, and so does SAS. I don't know how this affects interoperability between them. 'R' is known to be a powerful opensource stats package and I suggest you take a look at it. There are many GUIs available that work with R, most noteworthy of which is R-Commander. Cheereo.

By: jldugger

jldugger — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:25:14 +0000

Apparently our stats professors now teach students R, you might look to see if that meets your needs.

By: Jim Campbell

Jim Campbell — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:15:00 +0000

There is PSPP, which is a free software implementation of SPSS. Of course, some have said that it stands for, “People Should Prefer PSPP.” I think that it is command-line only, though, and I don’t think that it is a complete implementation of the SPSS language, but I don’t know all about it.

I’ll be following this thread to see what others say here, too.