Page 15 - Applied Statistics Using SPSS, STATISTICA, MATLAB and R

xviii Preface to the First Edition

capabilities of those software packages is also provided, which can be quite useful
for practical purposes.
STATISTICA, SPSS or MATLAB do not provide specific tools for some of the
statistical topics described in the book. These range from such basic issues as the
choice of the optimal number of histogram bins to more advanced topics such as
directional statistics. The book CD provides these tools, including a set of
MATLAB functions for directional statistics.
I am grateful to many people who helped me during the preparation of the book.
Professor Luís Alexandre provided help in reviewing the book contents. Professor
Willem van Meurs provided constructive comments on several topics. Professor
Joaquim Góis contributed with many interesting discussions and suggestions,
namely on the topic of data structure analysis. Dr. Carlos Felgueiras and Paulo
Sousa gave valuable assistance in several software issues and in the development
of some software tools included in the book CD. My gratitude also to Professor
Pimenta Monteiro for his support in elucidating some software tricks during the
preparation of the text files. A lot of people contributed with datasets. Their names
are mentioned in Appendix E. I express my deepest thanks to all of them. Finally, I
would also like to thank Alan Weed for his thorough revision of the texts and the
clarification of many editing issues.

J.P. Marques de Sá
Porto, 2003