SYSTAT 11
By Dale Farris, Vice President
Golden Triangle PC Club
June 2004

Program Overview

SYSTAT 11 is one of the most powerful statistical and graphical analysis packages now on the market. While some may think Microsoft's Excel provides all the data graphing capabilities they will ever need, many computer users regularly need more powerful statistical analysis capability than is built into Excel. Businesses with a major commitment to quality control and continuous improvement require constant sampling of their product specifications to produce data that must be diligently managed by a team of engineers and other staff with the technical skills and knowledge to accurately perform these tests and correctly interpret the results. A spreadsheet alone cannot meet the needs of these professionals. Instead, they turn to highly specialized, powerful statistical analysis packages like SYSTAT.

Professionals involved in medical research also need such powerful software to handle the research tools and techniques that are essential in being able to make carefully reasoned decisions based on data produced in their testing processes. In addition, higher level students will likely find themselves regularly involved in the design and implementation of research projects, and they too need SYSTAT to help them with the important statistical analysis of the results of the data gathering phase of their project. This analysis of research data is a good example of how important it is to integrate specialized statistical analysis software programs in these organizations and for these purposes. This is where the SYSTAT 11 program will provide the quality tool needed by these sophisticated computer users.

SYSTAT 11 is the latest update of this comprehensive but compact statistical package for personal computers. It is useful for researchers doing science, social science, or statistics in academic or commercial labs.

Dialog box items have new, interactive "what's this" help descriptions. New online HTML and context-sensitive help are available. Extensive tool tips are provided. All dialog box input fields show range value in the tool tips. Dialog boxes with limited parameter entries now come with multiple entries; entries can be added or deleted by the user. Individual command files are provided in the SYSTAT directory for hundreds of examples in the manual; with simple modifications to suit their data sets, users can run similar analyses effortlessly.

Data may be imported from numerous popular formats, including StatView, Stata, Statistica, JMP, MINITAB, and S-Plus.

Graphics are excellent and SYSTAT 11 now makes use of Microsoft's 16M color palette. It provides for more graph customization and improvement. Its new interactive Graph Editor lets you display each individual element name (e.g. Line Plot, Histogram, X-axis Legend, etc.) on moving the mouse over the editor. Interactive aesthetic change (Line style, Fill Style, Font, and Color) of each element is now possible while editing by a right-click. Editing text is done by double-clicking the text elements. The coordinate system can be changed, axes can be set, and grid-lines can be hidden or shown interactively.

The Mersenne-Twister random number generator offers a powerful random number generator with many desirable properties to facilitate modern bootstrap and Monte Carlo exercises. SYSTAT 11 now provides more Random Sampling, IID Monte Carlo, and Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms to generate random samples from many standard distributions, not-so-standard distributions, and indirectly specified distributions. These features help you accomplish your simulation tasks and give you computational help to solve your analytically intractable Bayesian problems.


What's New in v. 11?

• Revamped User Interface
  
  SYSTAT 11 comes with a thoroughly revamped user interface with increased customization of Menu, Spaces, Toolbars, etc. The menu bar has been reorganized to include two new items --- Utilities and Monte Carlo --- and with the Statistics menu item renamed as Analysis.
  
  SYSTAT 11 provides for import of new data formats like StatView, Stata, Statistica, JMP, MINITAB and S-Plus.
  
  Many existing dialog boxes have been reorganized so that additional settings are tabs instead of additional dialog boxes. All mouse functions have keyboard alternatives.
  
  
  
• Graphics with Improved Quality and Interactivity
  
  SYSTAT 11 now makes use of Microsoft's 16M color palette. It provides for more graph customization and improvement. Its new interactive Graph Editor lets you display each individual element name (e.g. Line, Plot, Histogram, X-axis Legend etc.) on moving the mouse over the editor. Interactive aesthetic change (Line style, Fill Style, Font & Color) of each element is now possible while editing by a right-click. Editing text is done by double-clicking the text elements. The coordinate system can be changed, axes can be set, grid-lines can be hidden or shown, interactively.
  
  Different formats for legends and changing the formats can be accomplished from the Graph Editor. The axis variable can be changed to produce another graph using the Graph Editor. Automatic and Mouse Interactive animation are available for three-dimensional graphs. GIF, TIFF, PNG & PS files can be exported. Zoom In & Out feature with selection Zoom and Step Zoom and moving in the graph by holding and dragging the graph using mouse are new features. You can set error bars and draw anchor bars interactively. Polyline, Arrow and Circle are new annotation objects from the Graph Editor.
  
  
  
• Monte Carlo (Including Markov Chain Monte Carlo)
  
  SYSTAT 11 offers the Mersenne-Twister random number generator, a powerful random number generator with many desirable properties, to facilitate modern bootstrap and Monte Carlo exercises. SYSTAT 11 now provides more Random Sampling, IID Monte Carlo, and Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms to generate random samples from many standard distributions, not-so-standard distributions, and indirectly specified distributions. These features help you to accomplish your simulation tasks and give you computational help to solve your analytically intractable Bayesian problems.
  
  
  
• Quality Analysis
  
  SYSTAT 11 provides a comprehensive set of statistical tools to help in all phases of a quality program in an industry --- Definition, Measurement, Analysis, Improvement, and Control phases. It provides additional Control Charts and tools like Gauge R & R, Sigma Measurements, Process Capability Analysis, Taguchi's On-Line SPC, and Signal-to-Noise Ratio Analysis of Taguchi Loss Functions.
  
  
  
• Probability Distributions
  
  SYSTAT's suite of 13 distributions has been expanded to 33 discrete and continuous, univariate and multivariate distributions. Desired number of random samples of the same desired size can be drawn from these 33 distributions. Probability calculations (density, cumulative distribution, inverse cumulative distribution functions) can be done driven by menu with dynamic dialog and graphs. Fitting of distributions can be accomplished in respect of the 28 univariate distributions with chi-square goodness-of-fit tests and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests; Shapiro-Wilk normality test can be performed for normal, lognormal and logit normal distribution fitting.
  
  
  
• New Regression Techniques
  
  Bayesian Regression provides another paradigm for fitting a multiple linear regression model. The prior distribution for the regression parameters used in this feature is the (multivariate) normal-gamma distribution. Bayes estimates and credible intervals for the regression coefficients are computed. Also, the parameters of the posterior distribution are provided along with plots of prior and posterior densities of the regression coefficients.
  
  Robust Regression now provides the Least Median of Squares (LMS) regression. Also the Nonlinear Robust Regression procedure has been enhanced with 3 additional weight functions: Ramsay, Andrews, Tukey.
  
  
• Row Statistics
  
  All the basic statistics and stem-and-leaf plot, including the newly-added P-tiles and N-tiles by seven different methods, are now available for rows as well as for columns.
  
  
  
• Hypothesis Testing
  
  Tests for variances, correlations and proportions are now available. These tests as well as the earlier tests for means, are provided with one-sided alternatives also.
  
  
  
• Power Analysis
  
  Power analysis computations are now available for one-sided alternatives also.
  
  
  
• Multivariate Analysis
  
  The Multivariate Analysis features are now reorganized under one drop-down menu item with the addition of a MANOVA feature incorporating the more-often used test procedures.
  
  
  
• Matrix Computations
  
  All matrix operations and computations can now be performed driven by menu.