Statistical Computing Environments For Social Research

The nature of statistics has changed from classical notions of hypothesistesting towards graphical and exploratory data analysis which exploits theflexibility o... » 

The nature of statistics has changed from classical notions of hypothesistesting towards graphical and exploratory data analysis which exploits theflexibility of interactive computing and graphical displays. This bookdescribes seven statistical computing environments APL2STAT GAUSS LispStat Mathematica S SASIML and Stata which can be used effectively ingraphical and exploratory modeling.These statistical computing environments in contrast to standard statisticalpackages provide programming tools for building other statisticalapplications. Programmability flexible data structures and in the case ofsome of the computing environments graphical interfaces and objectorientedprogramming permit researchers to take advantage of emerging statisticalmethodologies.Three additional chapters describing the Axis Rcode and ViSta statisticalpackages demonstrate how researchers have extended one of the computingenvironments LispStat to produce significant statistical applicationsemploying graphical interfaces to statistical software. «