>> It seems that MAXIMA is well suited for doing many common types of least
>> squares analysis (e.g., regression, analysis of variance). Much of the
>> necessary code could be adapted from IML, SAS, etc. Is anyone working on
>> this?
>>
>
> Hi Leroy, thanks for your interest in Maxima. There are some add-on
> packages for statistics, namely, stats (statistical tests), descriptive
> (descriptive statistics), and lsquares (least squares problems).
> The reference manual (http://maxima.sourceforge.net/docs.shtml)
> has some info about those packages. We are still developing
> statistical functions for Maxima so if you have any ideas or comments
> we would be interested to hear about it.
>
The stats package contains only a few inferential procedures. I have not
worked on it last year for two main reasons:
a) I needed a flexible drawing tool for plotting statistical graphics;
so I began writing the draw package (now that nobody is hearing me, I
can confess!). But this package is taken me more time than expected.
b) Some users asked me why should I write new procedures in Maxima/Lisp,
when there are so good and tested programs such as R (written in C).
At this point I am not sure what to do with stats. Should we continue
with the development of stats? or should we wait for a foreign functions
call system in Maxima to call R routines? (I have no idea how hard will
it be to implement this second alternative.)
Mario