Minitab 15
For some reasons today I was thinking about statistics and remembered the days that I had in university. This beat me to give Minitab a shot and checked its site again and wow, it's a new release there! The last version that I had used was 13 but now they have a 15.
Those who know mathematics know Minitab and also know that neither it's a professional statistical software nor it's a well designed application from software design point of view. No one can compare it with some great applications like S-Plus or SPSS but it's amazing for educational purposes and amateur calculations.
This could be a part of my Five Things List but let me say that I'm a talented guy in statistics and discrete mathematics. I'm sure almost all guys who read my blog know the importance of statistics and the effect that it can have on our success. I always keep a record of statistical data for future to analyze them and guarantee my success. In university most of our work for Time Series course was with Minitab. For those who don't know, Time Series can help you to analyze statistical data, find one (or so) models for them and predict the future with a tolerance. It's also possible to find the effect of different parameters in main model and calculate their correlations.
I can't tell you how sweet are Time Series and Stochastic Processes but I can share one of my experiences. For a project (for Time Series) I had to choose some real world data and analyze them with Minitab and what I had learned from theories. I asked one of my friends and got his site statistics for 1.5 years. As I was an active member of that site I knew a good history of what had happened to site in this while. After finding data models and calculating the correlation between data and different parameters, there was something really really interesting. Anything that had happened to site had its direct effect on my results and I could see anything in my numbers. I did a prediction on future (unfortunately that site was closed when I was doing my research) and could get amazing results. To see if this prediction is right, I used first 100 (or 200?!) days of data to predict next 100 days and how beautiful were those results. They predicted what had happened to site in real world! Things aren't as easy as what I'm writing. A good analyze needs a deep knowledge to be able to find good models and get correct result.
I have some sweet memories from my days at university and my knowledge in computer (not from university itself!). One day our Time Series professor (who was an amateur guy in computer and programming) was teaching us something about statistical models and was trying to show it in Minitab. An essential part of his lesson was to do some calculations on a column of data in Minitab but he didn't know much to write the code (I confirm that it wasn't something that even a normal computer guy can find its solution). He just came and told me this is the problem. A few minutes later there was a .TXT file to run as a script and do those calculations!!
+ Speaking of me, discrete mathematics and university, as much as I'm talented in discrete categories, I'm stupid when it comes to continuous mathematics. I was lucky to study Applied Mathematics and choose more discrete courses. One of my big troubles was with exams. It was so hard to find a correct answer for continuous problems (theorems and their proves were easy) but thank to god there is a reverse engineering! My technique was to reverse engineer some problems in order to find the correct answer. Another technique was to map continuous problem to a discrete model and solve it. I can't forget this one: we had a final exam for Complex Functions course and I was unable to solve a problem. Suddenly I started drawing some curves in my mind (you know many Complex Functions aren't 2D or 3D to draw them). Those imaginations helped me to solve the problem and pass that course. Surely those drawings were wrong but I don't know how could I solve my problem with them. Maybe I could find something new in mathematics! I began with Minitab and am talking about myself! It's better to close this post right now before stepping into tomato!
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1 Comment : 02.10.07
#1
Sia
02.10.2007 @ 11:27 PM