Should I use MATLAB or GAUSS for statistical analysis?

January 26, 2004 3:16 PM

Does anyone have experience using MATLAB or GAUSS for statistical analysis (specifically for financial modeling)? Pros/Cons/Prices of one or the other.
posted by Frank Grimes to Science & Nature (6 answers total)

If you are open to other options, you may want to take a look at R. I have no experience to share, but I understand R is popular for statistical stuff, and you can't beat the price ($0).
posted by Galvatron at 3:47 PM on January 26, 2004

Have you ruled out R already? It's an open source freeware workalike for S. There's a lot of stuff for it canned, and it can churn big matrices around. I dunno what you'd need it to do, and likely wouldn't be able to make sense of any reply (financial probably means time series, which means me running away in panic leaving Xeny-shaped holes in the walls), but it can do a damn lot.

Did I mention it's free?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:48 PM on January 26, 2004

Well, galvatron did, anyway.

I've used R for some simple monte-carlo simulations and hierarchical linear models, and it's worked fine, no complaints. The guy across the hall uses it for event-count time-series models and lauds it on a weekly basis.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:52 PM on January 26, 2004

I have done work in Gauss, but not MATLAB. I know that Gauss is fairly expensive (~$1200). I used it for maximum likelihood estimation. I would look into what system has the most suitable packages for your particular application.

(I have also heard that all the cool kids use R, so check into that too.)
posted by notme at 9:02 PM on January 26, 2004

Please see my previous comment. Matlab is expensive, but you have to contact them for a (academic / student ) quote.
posted by MzB at 6:12 AM on January 27, 2004

Also, you can download a student version of S-plus

R and S-plus should be pretty interchangeable, with the exception that you won't get push-button stuff with R.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:48 AM on January 27, 2004