Statistical Computing Environments for Social Research

The nature of statistics has changed from classical notions of hypothesis testing, towards graphical and exploratory data analysis which exploits the flexibility of interactive computing and graphical displays. This book describes seven statistical computing environments - APL2STAT, GAUSS, Lisp-Stat, Mathematica, S, SAS/IML, and Stata - which can be used effectively in graphical and exploratory modeling. These statistical computing environments, in contrast to standard statistical packages, provide programming tools for building other statistical applications. Programmability, flexible data structures, and - in the case of some of the computing environments - graphical interfaces and object-oriented programming, permit researchers to take advantage of emerging statistical methodologies. Three additional chapters, describing the Axis, R-code and ViSta statistical packages, demonstrate how researchers have extended one of the computing environments - Lisp-Stat - to produce significant statistical applications employing graphical interfaces to statistical software.