03. Software
Freely available software
GNU PSPP“GNU PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free as in freedom replacement for the proprietary program SPSS, and appears very similar to it with a few exceptions.
The most important of these exceptions are, that there are no “time bombs”; your copy of PSPP will not “expire” or deliberately stop working in the future. Neither are there any artificial limits on the number of cases or variables which you can use. There are no additional packages to purchase in order to get “advanced” functions; all functionality that PSPP currently supports is in the core package.
PSPP is a stable and reliable application. It can perform descriptive statistics, T-tests, anova, linear and logistic regression, measures of association, cluster analysis, reliability and factor analysis, non-parametric tests and more. Its backend is designed to perform its analyses as fast as possible, regardless of the size of the input data. You can use PSPP with its graphical interface or the more traditional syntax commands.”
“JASP is a free and open-source graphical program for statistical analysis supported by the University of Amsterdam. It is designed to be easy to use, and familiar to users of SPSS. It offers standard analysis procedures in both classical and Bayesian form. JASP generally produces APA style results tables and plots to ease publication. It promotes open science by integration with the Open Science Framework and reproducibility by integrating the analysis settings into the results. The development of JASP is financially supported by several universities and research funds. JASP vs. SPSS“
“jamovi is a new “3rd generation” statistical spreadsheet. designed from the ground up to be easy to use, jamovi is a compelling alternative to costly statistical products such as SPSS and SAS. Use jamovi in the cloud directly from your browser, or download and install jamovi onto your computer.”
The R Project for Statistical Computing
“R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, supported by the R Core Team and the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Created by statisticians Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, R is used among data miners, bioinformaticians and statisticians for data analysis and developing statistical software. Users have created packages to augment the functions of the R language. According to user surveys and studies of scholarly literature databases, R is one of the most commonly used programming languages used in data mining.“
“The RStudio integrated development environment (IDE) is a set of tools built to help you be more productive with R and Python. It includes a console, syntax-highlighting editor that supports direct code execution. It also features tools for plotting, viewing history, debugging and managing your workspace.”
Python“Python is a programming language that lets you work quickly and integrate systems more effectively. Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. Python consistently ranks as one of the most popular programming languages.”
Python makes coding useful and fun for nurses!
The Julia Programming Language
“Julia is an open source project with over 1,000 contributors. Julia is dynamically typed, feels like a scripting language, and has good support for interactive use. Julia was designed from the beginning for high performance.”
JuliaStats
“Statistics and Machine Learning made easy in Julia. Easy to use tools for statistics and machine learning. Extensible and reusable models and algorithms. Efficient and scalable implementation. Community driven, and open source.”
“Epi Info is statistical software for epidemiology developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Epi Info has been in existence for over 20 years and is currently available for Microsoft Windows, Android and iOS, along with a web and cloud version. The program allows for electronic survey creation, data entry, and analysis. Within the analysis module, analytic routines include t-tests, ANOVA, nonparametric statistics, cross tabulations and stratification with estimates of odds ratios, risk ratios, and risk differences, logistic regression (conditional and unconditional), survival analysis (Kaplan Meier and Cox proportional hazard), and analysis of complex survey data. The software is an open-source project with limited support. An analysis conducted in 2003 documented over 1,000,000 downloads of Epi Info from 180 countries.”
Software available through a University license
“MATLAB is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages.”
“Building on three decades of development, Mathematica excels across all areas of technical computing—including neural networks, machine learning, image processing, geometry, data science, visualizations and much more. Mathematica draws on its algorithmic power—as well as the careful design of the Wolfram Language—to create a system that’s uniquely easy to use, with predictive suggestions, natural language input and more. With its intuitive English-like function names and coherent design, the Wolfram Language is uniquely easy to read, write and learn.”
Wikipedia lists of statistical software
