Hi Lorenzo,
> I am interested in using Maxima for financial
> applications (portfolio investment and macroeconomics
> studies).
Whether Maxima is suitable depends on what you are trying
to accomplish. If you need mostly to do number crunching
(regression in various forms, plotting, summary statistics),
probably R (http://r-project.org) is better. There is at
least one R package for working with financial statistics.
If you want something to help you develop new methods
(which would likely involve more symbolic math),
Maxima might be helpful here.
> I browsed through Maxima's manual, but the part about
> statistics looked quite slim (only a Gaussian random
> number generator was listed).
There is little built-in support for statistical functions,
although I hope we can change that.
> I would like to know if other packages are available.
There is a package for descriptive statistics --
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/maxima/maxima/share/contrib/descriptive/
I don't believe there are other statistical packages at present.
> 1)linear regression and non-linear fitting (e.g.
> Levenberg-Marquardt)
An idea here is to translate LBFGS (a Fortran code) from Netlib.
I have used LBFGS, a modified quasi-Newton method, for
nonlinear regression and had good results with it.
> 2)having a family of statistically relevant
> distribution to study empirical data
We could beef up the descriptive statistics package with
distributions relevant to financial analysis.
> 3) numerical constrained optimization of function.
Not sure what we can do here, although searching Netlib
is probably a place to start.
My own interests are in Bayesian statistics. This amounts
to doing a lot of integrals, both symbolic and numerical.
I did some work on a scheme to compute some parts of a
Bayesian inference using a catalogue of standard results,
and applying numerical integration in one form or another
for whatever remains. Maxima could be a suitable platform
for implementing a scheme of that kind.
By the way, if come across any interesting statistical
packages for other algebra systems, or you write something
yourself, I would be interested to hear about it.
Robert Dodier
__________________________________
Discover Yahoo!
Use Yahoo! to plan a weekend, have fun online and more. Check it out!
http://discover.yahoo.com/