This handout is intended to provide a quick overview of the use of the Splus statistical package at the Harvard School of Public Health/Department of Biostatistics. Its main goal is to provide pointers to the appropriate documents needed to learn and use Splus successfully, not to provide a full tutorial.
Splus is derived from a system called S, which was written at Bell Labs. Splus is the commercially supported and augmented version, produced by StatSci (a Division of MathSoft). S and Splus are used interchangeably in this document, but only Splus is supported at HSPH.
From the StatSci book Splus: A Crash Course in Splus:
Splus is a flexible, graphical environment for visually exploring and thoroughly analyzing data. Using graphical displays and various other data analysis tools, you can obtain an understanding of the structure of your data, their distribution, and more. Among the tools Splus provides are the following:
- A wide array of graphics to visualize the structure of your data, determine distributions, find relationships between variables, and much more. Splus also gives you the ability to interactively work within graphical displays.
- Tools to manipulate your data. You can quickly modify or extract portions of your data to study.
- Statistical summary functions to get a synopsis of your data.
- Classical and modern modeling techniques for advanced exploratory and confirmatory data analysis.