Charles Seiter

PROS: Exceptionally complete suite of tests; fast; good statistical graphics.
CONS: Minor Mac interface problems.
COMPANY: StatSoft (918/ 749-1119).

STATISTICA/Mac has always had a large range of statistical tests; in version 4.1 it offers essentially the scope of the much larger and much more expensive SPSS suite. It's really convenient to get feature-rich time-series, reliability, survival, and cluster analyses all in the same package (STATISTICA provides different tests under the Stats menu, depending on the module you choose). These are extra-cost options for most other statistics packages--when they're available at all.

STATISTICA has always been fast, and now its performance is even faster, with genuinely dazzling speed on rotation of 3-D plots. The time-series module's Fourier-transform routine is essentially too fast to benchmark on typical datasets of only a few thousand points. It will be interesting to see what a native Power Mac version of this product (Stat Soft says one should be available in early 1995) could do with big spectral-analysis datasets, since the speed of the 680X0 version is exhilarating. Besides this, both 2-D and 3-D plots are attractively designed and can accommodate huge sets of points; STATISTICA had no problem with large sets (25,000 pairs of points) imported from a Spyglass test suite.

Little parts of STATISTICA still suggest that the core code was developed first in a non-Mac, non-SANE environment. You can open a dataset and click on the Close box, but closing the dataset is still an option under File. Whatever the logic, that's not how Mac software should work. The default scaling of axes in graphs can still produce surprises (see "Spinning the Numbers"). These are not major problems, however, and StatSoft's customer support for Macintosh users has greatly improved.

Since SPSS has acquired SYSTAT, the only real competition for StatSoft in the Macintosh marketplace is the newly redesigned SPSS Mac package, which, according to the company, should be available in January. Other Macintosh statistics products are either oriented more toward exploratory data analysis or are primarily graphics-based programs that don't attempt to compete on a feature-by-feature basis. The STATISTICA/Mac package offers a whole list of traditional tests that will be familiar to most graduates of college-statistics courses.

The Last Word

I would rather use DataDesk or JMP for doing exploratory statistics and StatView for creating presentations, but at present STATISTICA/Mac 4.1 is the undisputed features-per-dollar champion in the Mac statistics market.

March 1995 page: 79

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