Statistics for Computing Research
Most computing research projects need some simple statistical analysis at some point.
Software for data analysis and visualization
- R is a popular, free programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. You can download the software from the official R site for unix, windows and MacOS. A good introducion is simpleR Using R for Introductory Statistics.
- MATLAB is a numerical computing environment and fourth-generation programming language. UMBC has a site licence for MATLAB and versions are available for most operating systems.
- S-PLUS is a commercial implementation of the S programming language that features object-oriented programming capabilities and advanced
- Excel has some built-in and optional statistics functions and support for simple data visualization. It's ubiauitous, familiar and easy to use but experts point out that it has shortcomings.
Software for data vizualization
- Gnuplot is a command-driven interactive function plotting program. It can be used to plot functions and data points in both two- and three-dimensional plots in many different formats. It is designed primarily for the visual display of scientific data.
- The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts with a URL string. You can embed these charts on your web page, or download the image for local or offline use.
- D.L.Massart, J. Smeyers-Verbeke, X. Capron, and K. Schlesier, Visual presentation of data by means of box plots, Lc-Gc Europe, v 18, n 4, pp 215-218, 2005. This article provides an explanation of te ubiquitous box chart.
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