Any statisticians out there?

[akniss]

I'm pretty new to ubuntu (and Linux). I have been using the statistical program R for some time now, and in fact it is the program that really got me interested in open source and prompted my switch away from windows. my question is this...
Are there any ubuntu users who know of a good R code editor? I really liked Tinn-R for windows, but it doesn't look like there is a Linux version of this program. I've recently tried Rcmdr, and wasn't too impressed. I would also be interested if someone has had experience using Tinn-R under linux with WINE or other similar workarounds. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

to head off the inevitable question, I've already searched google and the R-help lists, and no really exciting finds. (that's where I first heard of Rcommander)

[david_finlayson]

Emacs has one of the best R environments available:

http://ess.r-project.org/

You're going to hate it for at least a month...something happens after a few weeks though. Your fingers "memorize" the keystrokes. You won't be able to type without emacs after that.

David

[akniss]

So after much searching, I've found that Kate text editor has a great environment for using R. It has some basic R Script highlighting, and you can invoke a terminal window from within Kate. Also, it has a 'Project' sidebar that I use to save data text files, spreadsheets, and related .R files. It works bettern than anything I've found in Windows or Ubuntu. Thought I'd post this in case it helps anyone else.

I did give ESS in emacs a go for a while, but never really got hooked. Someone who is already reasonably proficient in emacs would probably love it, but its a little too un-intuitive for me personally.

[towsonu2003]

I'm pretty new to ubuntu (and Linux). I have been using the statistical program R for some time now

sorry to post kinda off topic but, do you know of a nice newbie friendly R howto / tutorial that will get me started from the beginning? And, (being a foreigner to R), does it have a gui frontend-kinda window (like in spss)?

I am very, very very sick of spss and its stupid "your license does not include the help section, so screw you"-like messages. Especially bc. this error comes up in my department's computer grrr
-thanks in advance

[david_finlayson]

R is pretty close to S/S-plus. Your math library no doubt has several books on S (that's where I picked them up). For the most part they apply to R. I've noticed that newer editions often include R directly. There is also a nice tutorial included with the html documentation.

(use synaptic to instal r-doc-html first)

from R:

> help.start()

Click "An introduction to R."

[akniss]

sorry to post kinda off topic but, do you know of a nice newbie friendly R howto / tutorial that will get me started from the beginning? And, (being a foreigner to R), does it have a gui frontend-kinda window (like in spss)?

I am very, very very sick of spss and its stupid "your license does not include the help section, so screw you"-like messages. Especially bc. this error comes up in my department's computer grrr
-thanks in advance

The R project website has links to lots of good references. If you go to:
http://www.r-project.org/
there will be links under Documentation in the left pane. Lots of good stuff there. The best for beginners found by following the Manuals link and then An Introduction to R. It is available as HTML, PDF, or in print, if you desire. If you really want to get the meat of how to use R, the best book is Modern Applied Statistics with S (often referred to as MASS). It can be found here:
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/MASS4/

Two other books that I have found very useful:
http://staff.pubhealth.ku.dk/~pd/ISwR.html
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/depart...ia/NLME/MEMSS/

But without a doubt, the only way to learn R, S, SAS, SPSS, Minitab, etc is by doing. Install it and try it out. Work through the simple examples in the Introduction to R from the R site. Play with it, yell at it, and give up a few times. Eventually you'll find that you are so much more efficient than you were with SPSS that it will have been worth all the pulling out of hair and gnashing of teeth.
Good luck!

[towsonu2003]

thanks so much! very helpful links, especially the books. I love it when the book is downloadable (not in these cases though). I should do the same with my soon-to-be (boring) thesis.

[wouterommeslag]

Hello,

I'm a economics student at EHSAL, Brussels. For a paper I need a user-friendly statistics tool. I understand that R is a command-line program, for me that's not quite an option. I can't invest very precious time in learning how to use the software. I have to hand in the complete paper in a few weeks.

I would like an SPSS / Excel like look.

What do I need?

Several distributions like Normal, Binomial, Poisson, T-distribution etc
Some intervals (Z-insterval and T-interval)
Tests (One way ANOVA, Z-test, Smirnov,.. )

Help is very much appreciated!

For further details, you can mail me: wouter.ommeslag@student.ehsal.be

Thanks a lot,
Wouter

[towsonu2003]

Hello,

I'm a economics student at EHSAL, Brussels. For a paper I need a user-friendly statistics tool. I understand that R is a command-line program, for me that's not quite an option. I can't invest very precious time in learning how to use the software. I have to hand in the complete paper in a few weeks.

I would like an SPSS / Excel like look.

What do I need?

Several distributions like Normal, Binomial, Poisson, T-distribution etc
Some intervals (Z-insterval and T-interval)
Tests (One way ANOVA, Z-test, Smirnov,.. )

Help is very much appreciated!

For further details, you can mail me: wouter.ommeslag@student.ehsal.be

Thanks a lot,
Wouter

You could try out R with tk interface for starters. I think you run R, then type library(Rcmdr) and play around with the window it throws you in... The developers of R are old-fashioned unix geeks who are not very friendly to gui improvements imo. R itself, on the other hand, looks like much more powerful than SPSS. Well, I can't use R nevertheless, without better gui. Your choice.

You could also try how gnome's spreadsheet program (forgot its name, part of gnome office) and openoffice calc (along with 000-stats package -just google it) will meet your needs.

I could not find a statistics program to my needs and hence running SPSS under qemu (check out the forum for qemu howtos). it's slow, but it runs ok.

[akniss]

Hello,

I would like an SPSS / Excel like look.

Several distributions like Normal, Binomial, Poisson, T-distribution etc
Some intervals (Z-insterval and T-interval)
Tests (One way ANOVA, Z-test, Smirnov,.. )

It sounds like gnumeric should do most of what you need, although I'm not sure how it handles the various distributions.

sudo apt-get install gnumeric

Gnumeric is an Excel clone. However, when it comes to performing statistical analyses CORRECTLY, it far outperforms Excel. I use gnumeric for all my data entry needs, as it exports well to plain text for use in SAS or R.

I know its not something you want to hear, but if you will be doing much in the way of statistics in the future, it would really be worth your time to learn one of the CLI programs, of which R is the best in my opinion. However, if all you need are simple statistics (ANOVA, t tests, descriptive statistics) gnumeric performs quite well and might be all you need, and will hopefully get you through this particular time-crunch.