Statistical analysis software

Functionality	Background	Licence availability, restrictions and links to distributor
S-Plus is a general purpose statistical package and statistical programming environment. Standard analyses are available as pre-programmed functionality. It is a very powerful statistical package which can provide virtually any analysis	S was developed as a statistical programming language by J.M. Chambers at Bell AT&T Labs. As a language it allows any statistical analysis to be written and run on virtually any data. S-Plus is a commercial implementation of S. (R is a free implementation of a dialect of S: see entry on R). S-Plus has been developed and owned by a series of companies over the years and is now owned by Tibco, a company which focuses on business need for Analytics and data mining software. Currently S-Plus is being absorbed into Tibco’s Spotfire package.	A site licence with Insightful allows home use by staff and students. Available as a free download from ITS: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/its/ servicessupport/software/list/splus Spotfire S+ is marketed through the following website: http://spotfire.tibco.com/

Note on General Purpose Statistical Packages:

Broadly, these packages offer the user an easy way of applying standard estimation, confidence interval and hypothesis testing techniques to general data, usually input in the form of a spreadsheet.

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