review
Review STATISTICAL SCIENCE
mathStatica 2.5 Felix Grant presents his verdict L
ast reviewed in its version 2, mathStatica sees impressive developments with this upgrade – both in its own right and in its utilisation of new features in Wolfram Mathematica 8 (which it requires). According to the documentation, these are built on a 60 per cent expansion in the code base; I have to take that on trust, but the resulting benefits are empirically verifiable without any special effort. Starting the program, the visible changes are a new and well- designed scrolling palette design to accommodate expanded content (with distributions now organised by domain) and a permanent entry in Mathematica’s palettes menu. Both, in themselves, make the product far more productive.
In use, the most immediately noticeable thing is speed. Leaving aside the inherent advantage of mathStatica’s conceptually distinct symbolic approach to statistical
calculations, which in itself makes everything considerably faster than Mathematica alone, this is down to improved efficiency and transparent parallel processing. Multiple cores are picked up and used without any user action or even awareness.
I didn’t attempt to conduct scientific benchmarking, but my quick and dirty experiments with combinations of functions I use regularly suggest that
MY FAVOURITE BITS WERE IN THE HANDLING OF MULTIVARIATE PROBLEMS
a dual core machine cuts delivery time for results by anything up to 40 per cent compared to a single core, with subsequent doubling of cores cutting the time by roughly the same proportion.
Comparing mathStatica to raw New products
Makai Voyager 1.1 Makai Ocean Engineering has released a new demo of its Makai Voyager geospatial visualisation software. Version 1.1 includes internet streaming of scientific model data from Pacific Ocean tsunamis to Atlantic hurricanes. It provides users with an easy to access, cross-platform software package to process, analyse, fuse and display vast amounts of scientific and GIS data being collected and simulated in the earth, ocean and atmosphere. Features include volume rendering of large 4D data models, the display of
www.scientific-computing.com
dynamic data on the ocean surface, customisable graphs of scientific data, and faster streaming and improved WMS support.
The downloadable demo contains many of the scientific visualisation capabilities of the Makai Voyager software platform. The full version will contain data import and fusion tools to import and process GIS and scientific data, and provide users with access to add-on modules for specific tasks (e.g. lidar analysis). Makai Voyager is cross-platform software that runs on Windows (32- and 64-bit), Linux and Mac OS X.
voyager.makai.com
Origin 8.6 and OriginPro 8.6
OriginLab has announced the release of Origin and OriginPro version 8.6, providing a series of upgrades and feature
enhancements based on customer feedback on the previous version, 8.5.1. The most significant new feature is the availability of a native 64-bit version, supporting users as they work with large datasets. In addition to increased data storage, version 8.6 also features new gadgets that provide an intuitive interface for performing
data analysis immediately on a selected region of data in a graph. Three new gadgets were developed for Origin 8.6, namely Vertical Cursor, Sigmoidal Fit, and Curve Intersection. OriginPro includes all the new Origin features as well as advanced statistical tools in the area of Principal Component Analysis and Cluster and Discriminant Analysis. More Normality Test methods have also been added to this version.
www.originlab.com
FEBRUARY/MARCH 2012 17
Mathematica over the same functions saw improvement by factors of up to 30, though somewhere between five and 10 was the average figure across all trials. On a dual core machine, a large shopping basket of varied work selected to be representative of my own real day to day activity was dealt with in roughly a third of the time required by the previous release. A welcome cosmetic touch is the presence of progress indicator bars which, while they make no actual difference to anything, do subjectively make waiting times seem shorter! Moving on to the work itself, my favourite bits were in the handling of
multivariate problems, particularly the beautiful handling of multivariate discrete distributions. MDD usage is integrated into the new and improved territories of the Prob function, along with the improved piecewise handling which in many circumstances further enhances mathStatica’s separation from Mathematica in terms of quality and elegance. Non-rectangular domains are a potential headache to which mathStatica extends a new air of calm and simplicity, using Wolfram’s own piecewise provision in combination with standard domain expressions. There are, of course, as in most upgrades, numerous other improvements, additions, tweaks and so on. Over all, taking both the major extensions and the incremental details together as a whole, the result is a thoroughly comprehensive upgrade to what was already a very impressive and unique product.
www.mathstatica.com
For regular product updates, please visit
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