Page 150 - DLIS401_METHODOLOGY_OF_RESEARCH_AND_STATISTICAL_TECHNIQUES

Unit 10: Data Analysis Using Software Packages

might be its free availability including source codes. The design of R has been heavily influenced Notes
by two existing languages: Becker, Chambers & Wilks’ S and Sussman’s Scheme. Whereas the
resulting language is very similar in appearance to S, the underlying implementation and
semantics are derived from Scheme.
Since almost anything we can do in R has source code that we could port to SPLUS with little
effort there will never be much we can do in R that we couldn’t do in SPLUS if you wanted
to. However, R is considered superior to S-PLUS in context of drawing graphs since several
graphics features that R has; S-PLUS does not have.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. ........................ is a nice program for doing social research.
2. ........................ is a wonderful tool for doing data mining.
3. ........................ is very powerful numerical computational package.
4. R was initially written by ........................ and Robert Gentleman at the Department of
Statistics of the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand.
5. MINITAB statistical software is available for PC and ......................... .

10.7 Summary

• Many statisticians use several of the statistical packages at the same time. The core
statistical capabilities exist in each of the packages. Each of the packages has its own
strengths and ease of use features for the different types of analysis.
• SAS appears to be more appropriate for an enterprise solution, where the data may
reside in many different formats and SAS is the tool used to get at the data and perform
Statistical analysis.
• STATA does not play as nicely with other programs as SAS does. Also, STATA does not
have many of the modules available in SAS.
• MINITAB is very quick to learn. Nearly 450 textbooks (up to now) and textbook supplements
reference MINITAB Statistical Software, making it easy to use MINITAB in academic
courses.
• MINITAB is much more suited to statistical analysis than Excel, but definitely has some
significant disadvantages compared to SAS or SPSS.
• MATLAB is a (non-statistics-specific) mathematical programming language which happens
to contain some statistical routines.

10.8 Keywords

Ado Files : Interactive, very fast performance. Analysis can be done iteratively or
through programming is called ado files.
MATLAB : It is a mathematical programming language.
S-PLUS : It is a value-added version of S.

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