STATISTICA cited in prestigious journal
Mon, 14 May 2012 14:05:00 -0500
What American Women Do For Work, via NPR
Fri, 04 May 2012 14:00:00 -0500
STATISTICA Enterprise™ Helps Enhance the Operational Process Flow at Instrumentation Laboratory, a Global Medical Device Manufacturer
Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:49:00 -0500
The STATISTICA system can be controlled via three user interfaces.
Many aspects of these user interfaces do not exclude each other, thus depending on your specific applications and preferences you can combine them and use multiple interfaces while working with STATISTICA. For example, you may execute the same analysis every Monday. To save time and therefore money, you want to automate the analysis by recording a Visual Basic macro via the interactive user interface. This macro can be placed on a customized toolbar for easy access.
STATISTICA stores all program settings when you exit the program and restores them the next time you start the application. Different configuration can be saved for use in different work settings. These configurations can be imported or exported allowing a single configuration to be standard for everyone or individuals may be allowed to save settings on their computer to customize their work environment.
Even without any customization, the default settings of STATISTICA offer alternative user interface means and solutions to achieve the same results. This "alternative access" principle present in every aspect of its user interface allows STATISTICA to support different styles of work. For example, most of the commonly used tools can be accessed alternatively:
You can have several copies of STATISTICA open at the same time. Each can run the same or different types of analyses (traditionally called modules), such as Basic Statistics, Multiple Regression, ANOVA, etc. Moreover, in one STATISTICA application, multiple analyses can be open simultaneously. They can be of the same or a different kind (e.g., five Multiple Regressions and two ANOVAs), and each of them can be performed on the same or a different input datafile (multiple input datafiles can be opened simultaneously).
In order to facilitate taking advantage of this "multitasking" functionality, your work with STATISTICA is organized into functional units called "analyses" that are represented with buttons on the Analysis bar at the bottom of the application window (above the status bar, see the illustration, where Basic Statistics, Cluster Analysis, and Canonical Analysis are running simultaneously).
Consecutive buttons are added as you start new analyses. A variety of options is provided to control (and/or permanently configure) this aspect of STATISTICA.
By default, when you select specific output from a results dialog, the output (a table or a graph) is displayed and the dialog is automatically minimized into its respective analysis button on the bottom of the screen. Click that button (or press CTRL+R) to display the dialog again and resume the analysis.
A selection of options pertaining to analysis management is available on the shortcut menu (accessed by right-clicking on an analysis button on the Analysis bar) related to the respective analysis buttons.
When you run multiple analyses and the STATISTICA workspace becomes cluttered, you can hide all windows related to specific analyses (or close them altogether via the analysis button shortcut menu command Close All Analyses); you can also open new STATISTICA applications, which offers another simple way to organize and manage your work.
The interactive user interface of STATISTICA is the most commonly used, and in most cases the easies although it is not the only user interface available.
Similar to most software programs, menu bars and various toolbars are displayed at the top of the screen. Or optionally a ribbon toolbar is displayed. These are customizable. And at the bottom of the screen, the Analysis bar and the status bar are displayed. Additionally, shortcut menus are available when you right-click in appropriate places.
Data files can be displayed in spreadsheets, workbooks, reports, or individual windows. Results spreadsheets or graphs can be displayed in workbooks, reports, or individual windows. Note that additional documents (such as Word or Bitmap images) can also be displayed in spreadsheets, workbooks, or reports. Finally, STATISTICA Visual Basic code is displayed in macro windows.
While STATISTICA offers a variety of statistical and graphical procedures, each procedure can be performed in the same instance of STATISTICA. This means that, for example, it is possible to calculate residual statistics using options in the Multiple Regression module, then immediately use that output in the Factor Analysis or another exploratory module without first starting another application of STATISTICA.
When a statistical procedure is selected from the Statistics, Data Mining, or Graphs menu, a Startup Panel is displayed. Clicking anywhere outside the panel automatically minimizes it as a button on the Analysis bar. Users of systems with high-resolution screens can change this default and keep the consecutive dialogs on the screen. This way they can be used as convenient "toolbars" from which options can be requested.
If you prefer to use buttons rather than menus to select statistical analyses, you can activate the Statistics toolbar (which contains buttons for every module) by right-clicking on any toolbar and selecting Statistics from the shortcut menu that lists available toolbars. Alternatively, you can select Statistics from the View- Toolbars submenu. You can also create a new toolbar that holds the toolbar buttons for analyses you use most frequently.
When the desired analysis are selected from the Startup Panel, the analysis definition dialog is displayed. You can select the variables to be analyzed and other options and features of the task to be performed. Often, these dialogs have several tabs that group the options, analyses, and/or results in logical categories to make it easier to locate specific features.
In some simple analyses like descriptive statistics, the analysis definition dialog is also the output selection dialog. This dialog is where you request the type and format of the output (e.g., specific spreadsheets or graphs).
As described in more detail in Flexible Output Options, the consecutive output spreadsheets and graphs are displayed by default in workbooks. These workbooks can be saved and later reopened, making it easy to return to specific results as needed.
Additionally, you can send all output to an analysis report, which produces an easily organized (via the report tree), easily formatted, and easily printed report of a specific analysis. You can also choose to send all results, regardless of what analysis it comes from, to a single report. Alternatively, the output can be directed to separate windows.
STATISTICA provides direct access to all statistical and graphical analyses dialogs via the Statistics and Graphs menu (as well as from the Statistics toolbar and the Graphs toolbar).
These menus are never disabled, i.e., they are available whenever any input data document is open. The Statistics menu provides access to all available analysis types within STATISTICA. The Graphs menu provides direct access to a variety of commonly used graph types (e.g., scatterplots, histograms, means/error plots, etc.) as well as hierarchical access to all graph types in STATISTICA including 2D Graphs, 3D Sequential and XYZ Graphs, Matrix Plots, Icon Plots, Categorized Graphs, User-defined Graphs, Graphs of Block Data, and Graphs of Input Data. It also provides access to Multiple Graph Layouts.
To take advantage of STATISTICA's "multitasking" functionality, STATISTICA's analyses are organized as functional units that are represented by buttons on the Analysis bar at the bottom of the application window (above the status bar, see the illustration to the left, where Basic Statistics, Cluster Analysis, and Canonical Analysis are running simultaneously). Consecutive buttons are added as you start new analyses.
Depending on your preferences, you can choose to minimize all analysis dialogs when you select another window in STATISTICA or another application. By default the Auto Minimize option is selected; however, if your screen is large enough to accommodate several windows, it is recommended that you clear this option. This keeps the analysis dialogs on screen while the respective output created from these dialogs is produced, thus allowing you to use the dialogs as "toolbars" from which output can be selected.
It is easy to continue the current analysis or graph (i.e., to change the focus to the current dialog for a particular analysis). Select Resume from the Tools - Analysis Bar submenu, press CTRL+R, or click the analysis/graph button on the Analysis bar. When multiple analyses are running, you can also select the specific analysis from the Tools - Analysis Bar - Select Analysis/Graph submenu (as shown here).
To further facilitate the organization of windows from various analyses, you can hide all windows associated with a particular analysis when that analysis is deselected.
STATISTICA uses five principal document types:
Using these five document types, you can manage data of various types, perform data entry and analysis, generate graphs of the highest quality, develop custom applications of any degree of complexity, and create custom-formatted reports.
You can quickly access most recently used documents. Click the STATISTICA Start button (in the lower-left corner of the screen) and select Documents.
Each of the main types of STATISTICA document windows (see above) manages data in a different way and, thus, offers different customization and management options. These differences are reflected in the toolbars that accompany each type of window.
In addition to the variety of toolbars provided in STATISTICA, you can also create user-defined toolbars. These toolbars can include any command available in STATISTICA, as well as special controls (e.g., font name, font size, graph styles, etc.). The toolbars can be assigned any name and can be designated to open depending on the active document type.
Also, you can customize all toolbars (including existing toolbars) by adding commands and special controls.
To create a toolbar (or edit an existing one), use the Toolbars tab of the Customize dialog accessible from the Tools - Customize menu. Customizing a toolbar is as easy as dragging commands from the dialog to the toolbars, as shown in the illustration below.
Shapes and locations of toolbars can be easily adjusted (e.g., all toolbars can be docked or free floating). All of these options make it possible for you to create unique toolbars that provide you with a very specialized user interface. STATISTICA's Help includes simple to follow, step-by-step instructions on how to make those customizations.
Customizing the menus is equally easy and can be performed using the Menu tab of the Customize dialog shown here.
The industry standard STATISTICA Visual Basic language (integrated into STATISTICA) provides another (alternative) user interface to the entire functionality of STATISTICA, and it offers incomparably more than just a "supplementary application programming language" that can be used to write custom extensions. STATISTICA Visual Basic takes full advantage of the object model architecture of STATISTICA and can be used to access programmatically every aspect and virtually every detail of the functionality of STATISTICA. Even the most complex analyses and graphs can be recorded into Visual Basic macros and be run repeatedly or edited and used as building blocks of other applications. STATISTICA Visual Basic adds an arsenal of more than 13,000 new functions to the standard comprehensive syntax of Microsoft Visual Basic, thus comprising one of the largest and richest development environments available.
One of the features that makes the STATISTICA Visual Basic environment so powerful is the ability to integrate and manipulate various applications and their environments into a single program. For example, you can record or write a STATISTICA Visual Basic program that computes predictions via the STATISTICA Time Series module and execute that program from within an Excel spreadsheet or a Microsoft Word document. The exchange of information between different applications is accomplished by exposing those applications to the Visual Basic programs as Objects. So, for example, you can run statistical analyses in the STATISTICA Basic Statistics module from a Visual Basic program in Excel by declaring inside the program an object of type STATISTICA Application.
Once an object has been created, the Visual Basic program then has access to the properties and methods contained in that object. Properties can be mostly thought of as functions, methods can be mostly thought of as subroutines that perform certain operations or computations inside the respective application object.
The STATISTICA object model architecture is completely COM based which means you are not limited to using STATISTICA Visual Basic to control the application programmatically. You can use any programming environment that allows you to interact with COM objects, such as C++, Java, and .NET based languages such as C# and VB.NET. When the STATISTICA object library is imported into a .NET based language, a wrapper class called the COM Interop is created. The COM Interop layer causes the STATISTICA object library to behave like any other .NET object.
The WebSTATISTICA Server system is offered as a complete solution that includes the analytic functionality of the respective selected STATISTICA product or any combination of products, starting with STATISTICA Base and up to all enterprise systems: STATISTICA Enterprise/QC, STATISTICA Enterprise, and Data Miner. WebSTATISTICA Server is the ultimate enterprise system that offers full Web enablement, including the ability to run STATISTICA interactively or in batch from a Web browser on any computer (including Linux and UNIX), offload time consuming tasks to the servers (using distributed processing), use multi-tier Client-Server architecture, manage projects over the Web, and collaborate "across the hall or across continents."
WebSTATISTICA Server enables users to: