Difference between revisions of "Talk:Calc/To-Dos/Statistical Data Analysis Tool"

Revision as of 12:48, 2 August 2006

some discussions about the content:

How to structure the content of the page

first, it should be discussed how it is structured. many of these tools will have more than a number as output. they will require some input, based on dialogs. .. and much more

Should it consist of multiple separate dialogs, or one dialog with tabbed pages? I personally prefer the multiple separate dialogs for different types of analyses. --Kohei 02:44, 24 June 2006 (CEST)

Which Methods?

• Tests
  • t-test
  • ANOVA
• Certain Distributions?
  • Poisson distribution
  • Gaussian distribution

Models

• linear

Comment from a User

Hi. I'm a biologist and a teacher. I am somewhat concerned by the plan shown in the Statistical Data Analysis Tool article. It looks like heavy emphasis is to be put on "modern methods." I have two concerns with this approach:

1. While it would be nice to have these implemented, I would hate to see them hold up production. The fact is that most users who turn to a spreadsheet for stats don't want to use "the latest."

Currently, the spreadsheet of choice for Introductory Statistics students is (naturally) MS Excel. Why? Because it handles all the basic tests, measures and procedures. Currently, OOO does not. As a result, Professors are making students go out and buy MS Office, when they should be showing them how cool OOO is!

In my humble opinion, the priority should be catching up with the functionality of Excel. We can work on advanced Bayesian Stats later. We also should focus equally on parametric and non-parametric methods, because they are both important. Each has its own utility.

I think so, too. There is really a lot missing (histograms, ...). Can you or somebody else build a list of must have methods/functions/procedures to catch up with excel? I think, at first there should be a consens what has to be done first. --phatsphere 13:01, 2 August 2006 (CEST)

2. Similarly, there is a suggestion that the help function should steer people away from the mean in favor of the median. I'm not sure that this is appropriate. Each has its use. We should try to indicate when each is useful, and when each is prone to error.

I must admit that I am not a programmer, but I do support OOO by using and recommending it. I cannot do this if the app does not perform the functions that are needed. I hope that this edit will be taken as constructive criticism, and as a plea for more good work. Thank you! --ericpaulkatz

Second Comment from same user

Concerning the Use of R.

R is a very powerful tool. It would be delightful to create a OOO front-end for R. However, as noted in the article, we cannot include R with OOO.

I'm not sure that I understand the intentions of the section on R, but it seems to me that it implies making the statistical data analysis tool dependant on R. I would like to suggest that this might be a flawed approach.

If R cannot be supplied by OOO, then it will have to be installed separately, and OOO will have to know where it is in order to use it. To accomplish this, OOO will have to be redesigned to find R on any of three or four operating systems, based on at least 5 different package managers. But, since the power of R is best tapped by using R itself, I'm not sure what is accomplished by using it as the backend here. Yes, it would be easier to design the tool, but either there would be huge over-head in the installation, or low-power users would not be able to access the functions. --ericpaulkatz

I'm not a developer, but R is in my view a good reference implementation of those methods, this means, for testing, source of ideas and so on. I don't think that a heavy dependency on R has any use, too. --phatsphere 12:59, 2 August 2006 (CEST)

Remark

• Tests
  • t-test: ttest() is a function that is available within calc
  • ANOVA
• Certain Distributions?
  • Poisson distribution: poisson() is a function that is available within calc
  • Gaussian distribution: gauss() is a function that is available within calc

Maybe someone wants to implement a function anova() as an add-in or as a macro ?