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Bob.Muenchen (talk | contribs) Adding mention of my set of nine reviews of point-and-click front ends to the R Language. Tag: Reverted |
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==Reviews of free statistical software==
There are a few reviews of free statistical software. Muenchen reviewed nine menu-based packages that use the R language to perform their calculations<ref>{{cite web |last1=Muenchen |first1=Robert |title=R Graphical User Interface Comparison |url=https://r4stats.com/articles/software-reviews/r-gui-comparison/|access-date=25 April 2023}}</ref>. There were two reviews in journals (but not peer reviewed), one by Zhu and Kuljaca<ref>"A Short Preview of Free Statistical Software Packages for Teaching Statistics to Industrial Technology Majors" Journal of Industrial Technology (Volume 21-2, April 2005), Ms. Xiaoping Zhu and Dr. Ognjen Kuljaca. http://www.nait.org/jit/current.html</ref> and another article by Grant that included mainly a brief review of R.<ref>Felix Grant, "Free Statistics Software, Yours, Free to keep....", Scientific Computing World, Sept/Oct 2004, http://www.scientific-computing.com/scwsepoct04free_statistics.html</ref> Zhu and Kuljaca outlined some useful characteristics of software, such as ease of use, having a number of statistical procedures and ability to develop new procedures. They reviewed several programs and identified which ones, at that time, had the most functionality. At that time, several of the programs may not have had all of the desired ability for advanced statistics. Grant reviewed some of the programing features of R, and briefly mentioned the availability of other programs. One other paper reviewed statistical packages, mainly commercial, but includes R.<ref>Edward J. Wegman and Jeffrey L. Solka. 2005. Statistical Software for Today and Tomorrow. http://www.galaxy.gmu.edu/ (listed as "A Guide to Statistical Software".</ref> One article reviewed EasyReg and included a discussion of its accuracy.<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Hwan-sik | first1 = Choia | last2 = Kiefer | first2 = Nicholas M. | year = 2005 | title = Software evaluation: EasyReg International | journal = International Journal of Forecasting | volume = 21 | issue = 3| pages = 609–616 | doi = 10.1016/j.ijforecast.2005.02.003 }}</ref>
Only two reviews have compared the output of various packages.<ref name=shackman>Shackman, Gene. 2006. "Comparing free statistical software for data sets with no missing values" and "Comparing free statistical software, Handling missing data". Both available here "Free Software" http://gsociology.icaap.org/methods/soft.html</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=Shackman |first1=Gene |title=Free To Use Statistical Software: Comparing Statistical Analyses |date=10 May 2022 |url=https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105959 |publisher=SSRN |ssrn=4105959 |access-date=12 June 2022}}</ref> In the 2006 review, all of the packages read either [[Comma-separated values|CSV]] files or [[Microsoft Excel]] format. All of the packages gave exactly the same results for [[correlation]] and [[regression analysis|regression]]. The free software packages also gave the same regression results as did excel. One of the main differences among the packages was how they handled [[missing data]]. With the example data sets used in the review, and for the package versions available in November 2006 when this review was conducted, two packages, MicrOsiris and Epi Info, could read files with blanks for missing. Two other programs, Stat4U and WinIdams need something for the missing, like -9 or -9.99. The other packages could only handle data sets with no missing values. The more recent review, from 2022, compared output from a number of free to use statistical packages and found they all gave pretty much the same results.
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