Taming Statistics

Music City Center 

Room: CC-108 

Most software packages have hundreds of statistical functions. Our aim is to reduce the vocabulary required for students and practitioners to perform statistical analysis without having extensive programming skills such as those required for R. TamStat is a statistical package which uses English-like expressions to perform statistical calculations. What makes it unique is the use of operators which are higher order functions that allow users to modify or combine existing functions to make new ones. This approach allows for countless variations of statistical calculations by exploiting the structural similarities between basic groups of functions. Examples of these function groups include summary functions which compress a set of values into a single item representing the original data set, and distribution functions which associate a likelihood to a particular input. TamStat is written in Dyalog APL, a computer language whose notation has often been referred to as " a tool of thought." No prior knowledge of APL is required, but basic knowledge of probability and statistics is useful.