PSPP - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

PSPP is a free software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

application for analysis of sampled data. It has a graphical user interface

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

and conventional command line interface. It is written in C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, uses GNU Scientific Library

GNU Scientific Library

In computing, the GNU Scientific Library is a software library written in the C programming language for numerical calculations in applied mathematics and science...

for its mathematical routines, and plotutils

Plotutils

GNU plotutils is a set of free software command-line tools and software libraries for generating 2D plot graphics based on data sets. It is used in projects such as PSPP and UMLgraph, and in many areas of academic research, and is included in many Linux distributions such as Debian and cygwin. ...

for generating graphs.

It is intended as a free replacement of the proprietary

Proprietary software

Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...

program SPSS

SPSS

SPSS is a computer program used for survey authoring and deployment , data mining , text analytics, statistical analysis, and collaboration and deployment ....

Features

This software provides a basic set of capabilities: frequencies, cross-tabs
comparison of means (T-tests and one-way ANOVA); linear regression, reliability (Cronbach's Alpha, not failure or Weibull), and re-ordering data, non-parametric tests, factor analysis and more.

At the user's choice, statistical output and graphics are done in ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

, PDF, PostScript

PostScript

PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...

or HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

formats. A limited range of statistical graphs can be produced, such as histogram

Histogram

In statistics, a histogram is a graphical representation showing a visual impression of the distribution of data. It is an estimate of the probability distribution of a continuous variable and was first introduced by Karl Pearson...

s, pie-charts and np-charts.

PSPP can import Gnumeric

Gnumeric

Gnumeric is a spreadsheet program that is part of the GNOME Free Software Desktop Project. Gnumeric version 1.0 was released December 31, 2001. Gnumeric is distributed as free software under the GNU GPL license; it is intended to replace proprietary and other spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft...

, OpenDocument

OpenDocument

The Open Document Format for Office Applications is an XML-based file format for representing electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents....

and Excel

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...

spreadsheet

Spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...

s, Postgres database

Database

A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...

s, comma-separated values

Comma-separated values

A comma-separated values file stores tabular data in plain-text form. As a result, such a file is easily human-readable ....

- and ASCII

ASCII

-files. It can export files in the SPSS 'portable' and 'system' file formats and to ASCII files. Some of the libraries used by PSPP can be accessed programmatically; PSPP-Perl provides an interface to the libraries used by PSPP.

Origins

The PSPP project (originally called "Fiasco") is a free, open-source alternative to the proprietary statistics package SPSS. SPSS is closed-source and includes a restrictive licence and digital rights management

Digital rights management

Digital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...

. The author of PSPP considered this ethically unacceptable, and decided to write a program which might with time become functionally identical to SPSS, except that there would be no licence expiry, and everyone would be permitted to copy, modify and share the program.

Release history

0.7.8 current (Nov 2011) development version
0.6.2 October 2009
0.6.1 October 2008
0.6.0 June 2008
0.4.0.1 August 2007
0.4.0 August 2005
0.3.0 April 2004
0.2.4 January 2000
0.1.0 August 1998

Third Party Reviews

In the book "SPSS For Dummies", the author discusses PSPP under the heading of "Ten Useful Things You Can Find on the Internet".
In 2006, the South African Statistical Association presented a conference which included an analysis of how PSPP can be used as a free replacement to SPSS.

Official resources

Third-party resources

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.