The Graphical Interface
by Sharon Kardia

From MathSoft
Version 4.0 of this large statistical and graphical package

For many academic statistics departments, it is the statistical and graphical package of choice because of the ease of developing and distributing new statistical computational methods. Its statistical routines are easily extendable with common programming languages, such as C and FORTRAN. These attributes make S-Plus a perpetually growing resource for its users.

UNIQUE GRAPHICS FEATURES: The Trellis graphics of S-Plus provides a flexible format for visualizing multidimensional data. Specifically, these graphic features allow users to view the relationship between different variables in a data set through conditioning on other specified variables. S-Plus also uniquely provides hexagonal binning plots to display clustering in spatial data graphically.

STRENGTHS: Some of the main strengths of S-Plus are in its integration of statistical analysis and graphical display, especially for time series, survival analysis and regression analysis. Another strength is its interactive data links so that points can be brushed or highlighted on two-dimensional plots and their full data records investigated. S-Plus also has very good three-dimensional graphical capabilities and very good model diagnostic functions.

WEAKNESSES: One main weakness of S-Plus is its lack of graphics for factorial designs, for example ternary plots or cube plots. Another weakness is that its data management capabilities are cumbersome. There is much more that S-Plus could learn about graphics from Sygraph, which would make this package outstanding.

LIKELY USERS: S-Plus would be good for anyone who conducts statistical and graphical analysis as a part of day-to-day research. It would also be particularly good for scientists that are interested in keeping up with new innovative methods and their graphical display (for example, classification or regression trees) as this package is likely to have them available the fastest.

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