Books

Books : reviews

W. N. Venables, Brian D. Ripley.
Modern Applied Statistics with S-Plus.
Springer. 1994

S-Plus is a powerful environment for statistical and graphical analysis of data. It provides the tools to implement many statistical ideas which have been made possible by the widespread availability of workstations having good graphics and computational capabilities. This book is a guide to using S-Plus to perform statistical analyses and provides both an introduction to the use of S-Plus and a course in modern statistical methods.

The aim of the book is to show how to use S-Plus as a powerful and graphical system. Readers are assumed to have a basic grounding in statistics, and so the book is intended for would-be users of S-Plus, and both students and researchers using statistics. Throughout, the emphasis is on presenting practical problems and full analyses of real data sets. Many of the methods discussed are state-of-the-art approaches to topics such as linear and non-linear regression models, robust and smooth regression methods, survival analysis, multivariate analysis, tree-based methods, time series, and spatial statistics. All the data sets and S-Plus functions used are supplied with the book on a diskette.