Good Statistical Packages

[Alexander Volovics]

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.

R has been recomended. Indeed it is excellent and free but rather
time consuming to master (If you have no previous experience with
something like S or S-Plus).
You can get the basic 'R-2.0.1-0.fdr.4.fc3.i386.rpm' for FC3 at one of
the CRAN Mirrors, see: http://www.r-project.org/
(Read the onsite README first and download 'plummer.gpg' to check
the signature).
This might be sufficient for your needs otherwise you may have to
add additional specialized packages (there are many).
Read the on site manuals: 'R Installation and Administration'
and 'An Introduction to R' (especially the "A sample session" section)
first.

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.

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