S-Plus and R Statistics Software

S is a high level language and an environment for data analysis and graphics developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories, lead by John M. Chambers who, in 1998, received the ACM Software System Award where S was cited as

`The S system, which has forever altered how people analyze, visualize, and manipulate data.'

S-Plus and R are two implementations (or language `dialects') and our preferred statistics software tools. We use them for almost all of our data analyses, and also for research and teaching.

S-Plus

S-PLUS is a value-added version of S sold by Insightful Corporation. It is available in both UNIX and Windows versions. Lots of informations on S-Plus can be found via the Insightful Corporation homepage.

A summary of some features of S-Plus (in german) and its availability at ETH Zurich can be found via our Guide to statistical software at ETH.
The Seminar for Statistics also teaches S-Plus courses. Check the course program for a brief description and dates.

Some more links on S-Plus:

S-Plus page at EPFL
S-News Mailing List
Modern Applied Statistics with S-PLUS. Third Edition
S-Plus FAQ (unfortunately, this is a bit outdated)

R

R also know as `GNU S' is a statistics (& programming) environment, released GNU `copylefted', i.e., it is free to get including source code, and it's protected to remain free in the future.

R is a dialect of the S language, and therefore very close to S-Plus (see above), available for all major computer platforms, i.e. Unix-alikes (incl. Linux), Windows and MacIntosh. In addition, there are over 100 contributed packages available extending R's capabilities into many specialized fields.

For further information, see the R Project home page and (our mirror of) `` CRAN'', the Comprehensive R Archive Network, or consider the (documented part of) functionality in the Manual.
There's a very nice article in French from EPFL, Feb.2001.

"ESS" (Emacs Speaks Statistics)

Working with S-Plus and R is a lot more comfortable if you use it with Emacs and "ESS". Have a look at the ESS documentation for more information.

"StatLib"

From the Statistics Library server at CMU (master) / SunSite Austria (European mirror), we get numerous additional software packages notably for S-Plus and R.

Goto ETH Zurich main WWW server - Mathematics Department - Department of Computer Science

The SfS web masters, <www _at_ stat.math.ethz.ch> (address garbled against spam), Updated at $Date: 2002/10/30 10:14:18 $ UTC