Re: Graphing/Charting software
On Wednesday 08 October 2003 03:43, Ian Melnick wrote:
> Does anyone know of good graphing software that won't crash with huge
> amounts of data? All I need is a nice x-y plot graph, but I have over
> a million points. Excel has many limitations, as it turns out --
> which I managed to get around, but not the graph preview pane, which
> is horribly slow. Don't even ask about Quattro Pro, Gnumeric or
> StarOffice... *shudder*.
>
> What'd be nice is just a simple text-based program that outputs a
> nice postscript-type graph. Does such a program exist? And if so,
> does it do anything close to what I need?
R
Everybody go:
apt-get install r-recommended
now! :-)
Really, it is the only statistics software you'll ever need. It is
really beautiful. I used it almost exclusively for my thesis in
astrophysics, and it is a very vibrant community with some of the best
people in numerical statistics who develop it and answer newbie's
questions (allthough they might give you the RTFM sometimes, it's still
an answer... :-) ).
I once held 2 GB of data in RAM, just to try it out, and it didn't choke
on that... The main UI is a command-line interface, but it exists a
GNOME-based interface. I have never tried that. But it also exists a
very good Emacs package, ess, which is something most users make
extensive use of.
Also, the Debian packages are being very well maintained by Dirk
Eddelbuettel, and you can use this apt source to get the latest:
deb http://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/debian woody main
It is a good idea to keep R up-to-date, so this is recommended.
This work is also supported by the CPU-specific ATLAS2 packages, and
that makes Debian a very well suited OS for this kind of computing.
Having worked with R, I'd rather write thousands of lines of R code than
go back to proprietary systems like MATLAB or IDL. :-)
For more information, see http://www.r-project.org/
Cheers,
Kjetil
--
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Astrophysicist/IT Consultant/Skeptic/Ski-orienteer/Orienteer/Mountaineer
kjetil@kjernsmo.net webmaster@skepsis.no editor@learn-orienteering.org
Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/ OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC
Reply to: