AAS 204th Meeting, June 2004
Session 76 Data Handling, Computation
Poster, Thursday, June 3, 2004, 9:20am-4:00pm, Ballroom

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[76.01] VOStat: The R Statistics Package for Astronomical Data Analysis

E. D. Feigelson, J. Babu (Penn State), A. Mahabal, S. G. Djorgovski, M. Graham, R. Williams (Caltech), R. Nichol, D. Vanden Berk, L. Wasserman (CMU)

A long-standing limitation on the range and sophistication of statistical analysis of astronomical data has been the paucity of non-proprietary software. Our StatCodes Web metasite (http://www.astro.psu.edu/statcodes) has provided links to statistical programs and packages useful to astronomers and other physical scientists, but this collection is heterogeneous and quite incomplete. A more comprehensive and coherent data and statistical analysis environment has recently emerged in the open source R package (http://www.r-project.org) and its associated CRAN archive of add-on packages (http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/R/CRAN). Together, they provide hundreds of statistical functionalities, both simple and advanced, in a programmable data analysis environment with graphics and flexible links to external programs, languages, and databases. We outline these capabilities covering multivariate analysis and classification, parametric and non-parametric tests, regression and smoothing, survival analysis, time series analysis, and spatial analysis. Some of these R functionalities are implemented in our VOStatistics Web service. This work is supported in part by the NSF grant DMS-0101360.


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