A Review of Eight Statistics Software Packages for General Use

Eight statistical software packages for general use by non-statisticians are reviewed. The packages are GraphPad Prism, InStat, ISP, NCSS, SigmaStat, Statistix, Statmost, and Winks. Summary tables of statistical capabilities and “usability” features are followed by discussions of each package. Discussions include system requirements, data import capabilities, statistical capabilities, and user interface. Recommendations, based on user needs and sophistication, are presented following the reviews.     

A Note on “Characteristics of the Membership of the American Statistical Association, 1958”

A second course in statistics, for nonstatisticians who will use packaged statistical software in their work, is outlined. The course is directed toward the wise choice, use, and evaluation of statistical computer packages. The goal of the course is to train educated consumers of statistical programs. Particular attention is paid to computer-based data analysis, interpretation of output, comparison of competing packages, and statistical problems that arise when computers are employed to analyze large data sets.     

Aspects of Statistical Computing: What Packages for the 1980's Ought to Do

A wish list of desirable statistical computing capabilities is presented. This may help one question which of these capabilities can be satisfied by existing packages, which might be met through reasonable extensions to these packages, which might require substantial new development, and which ought to be supplied by the computing environment rather than the packages. These questions are explored, taking into account the nature of the statistical work and the choices presented by technology. Attention is given to the barriers to be overcome if future statistical packages are to take full advantage of new technology.     

Statistical Microcomputing—Like it is

A statistical software package is a collaborative effort between a program's authors and users. When statistical analysis took place exclusively on mainframe computers, the entire statistical community was served by some three to six major packages, which helped to ensure that program errors would be quickly uncovered and corrected. The current trend toward performing statistical analysis on microcomputers has resulted in an explosion of software of varying quality, with more than 200 packages for the IBM PC alone. Since all of these programs are competing for the same base of knowledgeable users, the number of sophisticated users per package is dramatically less than for mainframe packages; the net result is that problems in any particular package are more likely to go unnoticed and uncorrected. For example, the most widely used shareware package contains major errors that should cause it to be rejected out of hand, and three best-selling packages analyze unbalanced two-factor experiments using an approximate technique originally developed for hand calculation. Several strategies are offered to help author and user reveal any problems that might be present in their software.     

Introductory Statistics Textbooks and the GAISE Recommendations

The six recommendations made by the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) committee were first communicated in 2005 and more formally in 2010. In this article, 25 introductory statistics textbooks are examined to assess how well these textbooks have incorporated the three GAISE recommendations most relevant to implementation in textbooks (statistical literacy and thinking; use of real data; stress concepts over procedures). The implementation of another recommendation (using technology) is described but not assessed. In general, most textbooks appear to be adopting the GAISE recommendations reasonably well in both exposition and exercises. The textbooks are particularly adept at using real data, using real data well, and promoting statistical literacy. Textbooks are less adept—but still rated reasonably well, in general—at explaining concepts over procedures and promoting statistical thinking. In contrast, few textbooks have easy-usable glossaries of statistical terms to assist with understanding of statistical language and literacy development. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Fishery and Forestry Management

There are a large number of different definitions used for sample quantiles in statistical computer packages. Often within the same package one definition will be used to compute a quantile explicitly, while other definitions may be used when producing a boxplot, a probability plot, or a QQ plot. We compare the most commonly implemented sample quantile definitions by writing them in a common notation and investigating their motivation and some of their properties. We argue that there is a need to adopt a standard definition for sample quantiles so that the same answers are produced by different packages and within each package. We conclude by recommending that the median-unbiased estimator be used because it has most of the desirable properties of a quantile estimator and can be defined independently of the underlying distribution.     

Efficient iteration procedures for maximum likelihood factor analysis

A class of fast convergent iteration procedures for ML factor analysis is presented in this paper. It includes a further development of Jöreskog’s (1971 with van Thillo, 1977) Newton-Raphson-like procedure which is widely available in statistical program packages but which is inclined to fail when solving difficult problems. In a comparison of efficiency, besides these two algorithms, our own versions of two quasi-Newton methods, namely the Davidon-Fletcher-Powell (DFP) and the Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) method, are tested.     

Automatic bandwidth selection in robust nonparametric regression

Nonparametric regression techniques have been studied extensively in the literature in recent years due to their flexibility.In addition robust versions of these techniques have become popular and have been incorporated into some of the standard statistical analysis packages.With new techniques available comes the responsibility of using them properly and in appropriate situations. Often, as in the case presented here, model-fitting diagnostics, such as cross-validation statistics,are not available as tools to determine if the smoothing parameter value being used is preferable to some other arbitrarily chosen value.     

Statistical Computing Packages: Some Words of Caution

Three situations are cited when caution is needed in using statistical computing packages: (a) when analyzing data and having insufficient statistical knowledge to completely understand the output; (b) when teaching the use of packages in a statistics course, to the exclusion of teaching statistics; and (c) when using packages in subject-matter teaching, without teaching the statistical methods underlying the packages.     

A revisit to test the equality of variances of several populations

We revisit the problem of testing homoscedasticity (or, equality of variances) of several normal populations which has applications in many statistical analyses, including design of experiments. The standard text books and widely used statistical packages propose a few popular tests including Bartlett's test, Levene's test and a few adjustments of the latter. Apparently, the popularity of these tests have been based on limited simulation study carried out a few decades ago. The traditional tests, including the classical likelihood ratio test (LRT), are asymptotic in nature, and hence do not perform well for small sample sizes. In this paper we propose a simple parametric bootstrap (PB) modification of the LRT, and compare it against the other popular tests as well as their PB versions in terms of size and power. Our comprehensive simulation study bursts some popularly held myths about the commonly used tests and sheds some new light on this important problem. Though most popular statistical software/packages suggest using Bartlette's test, Levene's test, or modified Levene's test among a few others, our extensive simulation study, carried out under both the normal model as well as several non-normal models clearly shows that a PB version of the modified Levene's test (which does not use the F-distribution cut-off point as its critical value), and Loh's exact test are the “best” performers in terms of overall size as well as power.     

Comparison of different computational implementations on fitting generalized linear mixed-effects models for repeated count measures

ABSTRACT

In modelling repeated count outcomes, generalized linear mixed-effects models are commonly used to account for within-cluster correlations. However, inconsistent results are frequently generated by various statistical R packages and SAS procedures, especially in case of a moderate or strong within-cluster correlation or overdispersion. We investigated the underlying numerical approaches and statistical theories on which these packages and procedures are built. We then compared the performance of these statistical packages and procedures by simulating both Poisson-distributed and overdispersed count data. The SAS NLMIXED procedure outperformed the others procedures in all settings.     

On evaluating interactive statistical program packages

Most statistical computing for data analysis has come to depend upon statistical program packages. In recent years, interactive computing has become widespread both on large time-sharing systems and on mini-computers. This paper identifies ways in which interactive statistical software packages differ from batchoriented software and discusses evaluation considerations pertaining specifically to interactive packages.     

Goals for Statistical Uses of Administrative Records: The Next 10 Years

United States statistical agencies use data from administrative record systems to develop program statistics, to establish statistical data bases, and to enhance and evaluate census and survey data. Such uses of administrative records are likely to increase as efforts to control costs and respondent burden of statistical programs continue. This review article proposes six goals for enhanced statistical uses of administrative records in the next 10 years and describes elements of an activist strategy to achieve them. The discussants, representing three agencies that make important statistical uses of administrative records, give their reactions to the proposed goals and strategy.     

根植统计工作实践，促进统计事业发展 ——新中国政府统计科研工作60年回顾

 60年前,国家统计局的正式成立,标志着新中国政府统计机构正式建成运转。回首60年的历程,统计事业的兴衰与祖国命运紧密联系在一起;而统计科研工作作为整个统计事业的重要组成部分,也在曲折与挑战中不断发展和完善。本文从机构人员、科研活动、科研管理、学会建设和学术期刊等五个方面对政府统计科研工作进行了全面的回顾和梳理。今后统计科研工作仍将致力于统计科学的研究与实践,围绕国家统计局中心工作的同时,充分发挥中国统计学会的桥梁、纽带作用,利用杂志等学术平台,不断加强对全国统计科研工作的组织和管理,为我国统计事业的发展发挥重要作用。     

Sunset Salvo

The Wilcoxon—Mann—Whitney test enjoys great popularity among scientists comparing two groups of observations, especially when measurements made on a continuous scale are non-normally distributed. Triggered by different results for the procedure from two statistics programs, we compared the outcomes from 11 PC-based statistics packages. The findings were that the delivered p values ranged from significant to nonsignificant at the 5% level, depending on whether a large-sample approximation or an exact permutation form of the test was used and, in the former case, whether or not a correction for continuity was used and whether or not a correction for ties was made. Some packages also produced pseudo-exact p values, based on the null distribution under the assumption of no ties. A further crucial point is that the variant of the algorithm used for computation by the packages is rarely indicated in the output or documented in the Help facility and the manuals. We conclude that the only accurate form of the Wilcoxon—Mann—Whitney procedure is one in which the exact permutation null distribution is compiled for the actual data.     

A Study of Student Reaction to the Use of Minitab in an Introductory Statistics Course

Traditionally, the introductory statistics course, Principles of Statistics (STAT 101), at Iowa State University has been taught without reference to a statistical analysis computing package. Although important for the implementation of statistical techniques, a computer component has been perceived by instructors to take time away from the coverage of statistical topics. To gauge students' reactions to the usefulness of a statistical computing package, an experiment was conducted during the fall term of 1986. Volunteers from a STAT 101 class were randomly assigned to either a control group or a computer use group. Both groups filled out questionnaires at the beginning and end of the semester. During the semester, the computer use group had access to and instruction in the use of Minitab. This instruction was tied to homework and laboratory assignments for the course. This article presents results of this experiment. On the basis of the responses to the questionnaires, the value of a statistical computing package as a pedagogical tool is examined. Recommendations for the use of a statistical computing package in a large introductory statistics course are made.     

A Review of Three Directed Acyclic Graphs Software Packages

This article offers a review of three software packages that estimate directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from data. The three packages, MIM, Tetrad and WinMine, can help researchers discover underlying causal structure. Although each package uses a different algorithm, the results are to some extent similar. All three packages are free and easy to use. They are likely to be of interest to researchers who do not have strong theory regarding the causal structure in their data. DAG modeling is a powerful analytic tool to consider in conjunction with, or in place of, path analysis, structural equation modeling, and other statistical techniques.     

Effective Microcomputer Statistical Software

This article focuses on important aspects of microcomputer statistical software. These include documentation, control language, data entry, data listing and editing, data manipulation, graphics, statistical procedures, output, customizing, system environment, and support. The primary concern is that a package encourage good statistical practice.