ROI Alliance Releases Free R-based ROIstat Statistical Application

(The ROI Alliance LLC: Longmont, CO) -- The ROI Alliance announces the release of ROIstat, a GUI-based app to make using applied statistics easy via the powerful R statistics programming language.

The value of using statistics in business cannot be overstated. Statistics are how people make decisions when they don’t know everything, which in business is pretty much all the time. Every manager needs to know at least the basics of statistics to make good decisions, and will frequently need to perform some straightforward analyses. Engineers and other technical resources use statistics to make a variety of recommendations.

Recently, however, The ROI Alliance has noticed an ongoing trend with their customers. Client companies are less willing to pay thousands of dollars for statistics software, asking why they should pay for something when there is a free and comprehensive alternative available. They are often referring to the R Project, a free and open source system for statistical computation. And make no mistake, R is the new standard software for statistics in higher education and is becoming so in industry.

R can do pretty much anything you want it to do, but that flexibility comes at a price. “R is hard to learn and easy to forget!” a former student exclaimed. If someone uses it every day and has some packages or scripts that they trust, they can do amazing things with it.

For the occasional user, however, it is quite a different story. People waste hours re-familiarizing themselves with the scripting language, trying to remember how to do this test or that, what packages to download, how to form the data, and then in debugging the script to get the answer they need. ROI president Steve Ouellette, author of ROIstat, says, “I myself have been frustrated knowing full well that R can do something but not being able to figure out how to make it work.

“Even worse, I fear that scripting in R is often so complicated and overwhelming that infrequent users will avoid it entirely if that is the only path they have to analyses. And the modern business can no longer tolerate nondata-driven decision-making.”

That is why The ROI Alliance created its new free R app ROIstat. It runs a graphic user interface (GUI), so users will have the familiar point and click functionality. It runs on R, which is also free. ROIstat is designed for teaching, learning, and for those times when you need to get in, get an answer, and get on with your life.

The ROI Alliance has just released ROIstat v1.0. There are some videos on this announcement page to show you just how easy it is to use, and how comprehensive it already is. If you have missed your GUI or just need a free way to do data analysis, ROIstat is a great alternative. The plans are to add more features over time as well, with the ultimate goal of giving the basic to advanced stats users what they need right at their fingertips.

About The Author