On 2/21/2009 3:22:52 AM, pleitch wrote:
>yech - patants are terrible
>things.
Only when they are other peoples
🙂>My background is Applied
>Biology and Environmental
>Science (double major BSc) -
>so I did statistics (a lot of
>statistics), but never dealved
>into clustering, PCA/Factor
>analysis. I've more recently
>completed an MBA - but that
>was devoid of statistics.
>
>I've done two honours (year of
>research), for both the BSc
>and MBA and both were
>statistics based. But again,
>neither was based of this area
>which is why I am teaching
>myself. Same as Baysian
>statistics - I've dabbled
>enough to know I don't know
>enough so I'm about to order
>some books on that.
Well, my only formal training in statistics was when I was force fed a dose of it during my physics degree. That did not cover anything to do with multivariate analysis, cluster analysis, etc. I have learned it from books, by listening to a lot of talks at conferences, and by getting a lot of advice from colleagues that know more about it than I do. In my field people usually avoid the term "statistics", and use the term "chemometrics" instead. I believe the term was coined because the statistics based algorithms are often applied to data and/or applied in a way that violates the statistical assumptions. So the results are not really statistical, but they work and are exceeding useful.
>R - is that a free software?
>Do you have some links for it?
>I have seen some books on it
>but I've never heard about it.
>I didn't know it was a
>programming language until
>your post just now.
I don't know much about it myself. I had someone recommend it to me about a year ago. He seemed to think it was the best thing since sliced bread (which, as it happens, I hate), but then he was a statistician. I think it's sort of a statistical Matlab. You can download it here:
http://www.r-project.org/Richard