XploRe: An Interactive Statistical Computing Environment

This book describes an interactive statistical computing environment called 1 XploRe. As the name suggests, support for exploratory statistical analysis is given by a variety of computational tools. XploRe is a matrix-oriented statistical language with a comprehensive set of basic statistical operations that provides highly interactive graphics, as well as a programming environ ment for user-written macros; it offers hard-wired smoothing procedures for effective high-dimensional data analysis. Its highly dynamic graphic capa bilities make it possible to construct student-level front ends for teaching basic elements of statistics. Hot keys make it an easy-to-use computing environment for statistical analysis. The primary objective of this book is to show how the XploRe system can be used as an effective computing environment for a large number of statistical tasks. The computing tasks we consider range from basic data matrix manipulations to interactive customizing of graphs and dynamic fit ting of high-dimensional statistical models. The XploRe language is similar to other statistical languages and offers an interactive help system that can be extended to user-written algorithms. The language is intuitive and read ers with access to other systems can, without major difficulty, reproduce the examples presented here and use them as a basis for further investigation.

I A Beginner s Course. - 1 Un Amuse-Gueule. - 2 An XploRe Tutorial. - 3 The Integrated Working Environment. - II XploRe in Use. - 4 Graphical Aids for Statistical Data Analysis. - 5 Density and Regression Smoothing. - 6 Bandwidth Selection in Density Estimation. - 7 Interactive Graphics for Teaching Simple Statistics. - 8 XClust: Clustering in an Interactive Way. - 9 Exploratory Projection Pursuit. - 10 Generalized Linear Models. - 11 Additive Modeling. - 12 Comparing Parametric and Semiparametric Binary Response Models. - 13 Approximative Methods for Regression Models with Errors in Covariates. - 14 Nonlinear Time Series Analysis. - 15 Un Digestif. - A Questions to XploRe. - B Language Reference. - B. 1 Operators. - B. 2 Flow Control. - B. 3 Commands. - References. - Author Index.