STATISTICA

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

STATISTICA
Developed by	StatSoft
Latest release	8.0 / 2007
OS	Windows
Genre	numerical analysis
License	Proprietary software
Website	www.statsoft.com

STATISTICA is a statistics and analytics software package developed by StatSoft, Inc. STATISTICA provides a selection of data analysis, data management, data mining, and data visualization procedures. Features of the software include basic and multivariate statistical analysis, quality control modules, neural networks, and a collection of data mining techniques. All of these tools are provided in an open architecture with a single software platform.

1 User Interface
2 Analytic Techniques
3 Graphics
4 Statistica Visual Basic Environment
5 Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] User Interface

STATISTICA product categories include Enterprise (for use across a site or organization), Web-Based (for use with a server and web browser), Concurrent and Standard Network Desktop, and Single-User Desktop. STATISTICA has an interactive graphical user interface with customizable menus and toolbars. STATISTICA also has an API-based interface that allows all of the program's functions to be callable from other applications such as Visual Basic, C++, and Java, and internally callable from the built-in STATISTICA Visual Basic user interface.

There are three basic channels to which you can direct all analysis results spreadsheets and graphs: workbooks, reports, and standalone windows. Workbooks and reports are Active X document containers, which means they can hold all native STATISTICA documents as well as other types of Active X documents, including Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft Word documents. Workbooks contain two panels: a navigation tree on the left and a document viewer on the right that allows the user to view the document that is selected on the left. Reports display a series of spreadsheets, graphs, or other objects sequentially in a word processor style document. Workbooks have a file extension of .stw and reports have a file extension of .str.

Data files are typically displayed in spreadsheets. The basic form of the spreadsheet is a two-dimensional table arranged as cases (rows) and variables (columns). STATISTICA spreadsheets have a file extension of .sta.

[edit] Analytic Techniques

STATISTICA contains several main groups of analytic techniques, which can be accessed from the Statistica menu bar. The software provides options for common basic statistics, multivariate techniques, and advanced linear/nonlinear models. Quality control techniques include quality control charts and process analysis. The Design of Experiments module provides an interface for setting up and analyzing experiment data sets. Other main types of analyses include Neural Networks and Data Mining.

[edit] Graphics

STATISTICA includes analytic and exploratory graphs in addition to standard 2- and 3-dimensional graphs. The graphics technology provides a collection of brushing techniques, which allows for investigation of outliers and exploratory data analysis. Brushing actions include interactive labeling, marking, and exclusion of selected data points. The appearance of each graph can be customized, and the graph can be saved in several graphics file formats, including JPG, PNG, Windows metafile (WMF), device-independent Windows bitmap (BMP), and Encapsulated Postscript (EPS) files. STATISTICA graphs are Active-X objects that can be embedded into compatible documents, such as Excel or Word documents, where they can be edited by double clicking on them.

[edit] Statistica Visual Basic Environment

The STATISTICA Visual Basic environment includes a text editor, debugging tools, and an Object Browser to aide the user in selecting classes, functions, and properties for manually creating or editing STATISTICA Visual Basic macros. The software also provides three options for creating macros automatically. Analysis Macros record the settings and output options chosen for a particular analysis. A Master Macro can record a series of analyses. A Keyboard Macro records the actual series of keystrokes that a user enters via the keyboard.

Importing data with STATISTICA STATISTICA includes a facility to import text based data files. With this mechanism STATISTICA helps to bridge the gap of being able to get your data into the software. This is useful for the end-user who logs their own data. It is also useful for bringing in data that has been exported from another software package in a common textual format. STATISTICA provides two interfaces for textual importing; largely because the interfaces would become too cluttered if they were combined. These interfaces handle fixed width text files and variable width text files. More importantly, STATISTICA's import facility is based on smart, sophisticated parsing that the end-user has good control over. If the data being imported were viewed like an object, then the user would tell STATISTICA what characters, or sequence of characters to expect to cause a line of data to be defined. In the same way, the end-user would tell STATISTICA what characters, or sequence of characters to expect to cause a break in data points. The import facility also allows you to tell the system what to use as a decimal point, what to use as string delimiters, and what to use as escape sequence.