allan@questar.UUCP (09/29/87)
I am looking for a commercial statistical package for a Macintosh. Has anyone used, or heard of such a beast? It should cover both descriptive and inferential statistics. Please evaluate if you have had any experience with your recommendataion. Plsase email responses to: allan@Questar.MN.ORG Thanks.
g451252772ea@deneb.ucdavis.edu (0040;0000007433;0;327;142;) (10/07/87)
The near-standard stat packages in Macdom are few, and of them, your needs suggest StatView 512+, version 1.1, by ?BrainPower? (who makes these names?). It does good univariates, with sig. tests; modest ANOVAs; multiple regression; and factor analysis. The graphics for these are very well integrated - but may be omitted if desired. Graphics highlights are sunflower plots (for overlapping points) and regression confidence intervals. If you have specific ANOVA requirements, HSD ANOVA (Human Systems Dynamics) (again, who... ) is competantly done; they started back in Apple II days. There's also GANOVA, a package from folk at UCLA in semi-commercial release. This and other packages are reviewed in an article in the last year's issues of Behavior Research Methods, Instrumentation and Computers, which is the academic journal of the Psychonomic society, but chock full of pragmatic, unbiased techie info. The ultimate stat package for the Mac and IBM both is SYSTAT, from Systat (hooray- a logical name!) in Chicago. It lives in about 1.5 meg of your hard disk, has 9-10 separate 'user-cordial(TM)' programs, including the humongo MGLH (multivariate general linear hypothesis). It helps to at least be literate in matrix algebra for this, which is the program used for simple regression up thru canonical correlation and MANOVA. But the manual also provides lots of examples, and a few of them are even fun. On the Mac this program is unequalled; for the IBM there are others, but Systat is one of the few to be professionally appraised by statisticians and survive (Statview version 1.0 had known bugs in regression beta weights, for example). But the Mac interface for StatView is MUCH better than Systat's, which is only ... cordial. Ron Goldthwaite, Psychology and Ethology, U.Calif at Davis 'Economics is a branch of ethics, pretending to be a science; Ethology is a science, pretending relevance to ethics.'