This new version (2.3) of Statistics::Descriptive contains:
- Code provided by Andrea Spinelli to prevent division by zero and to
make consistent return values for undefined behavior.
- Andrea also wrote a great test bench to check out the division
by zero. We'll be extending it to check for other things, too.
- Code to calculate the percentile of the data as defined by RFC2330
Thanks to Warren Matthews for his contribution.
- A bug fix for the calculation of frequency distributions. Thanks to
Nick Tolli for alerting me to this.
- Slight changes to the Makefile to make the ActiveState people happy.
Hey, if they're going to make Perl easy for Windows users then I
can add a few lines of text to a Makefile for them.
Documentation was also added to show how to turn the return value
of least_squares_fit into a hash. If returning a hash is something
that many of you users want then I'll add it to the next release.
List of methods by class:
Statistics::Descriptive::Sparse
----------------------------------
add_data
count
mean
sum
variance
pseudo_variance
min
max
mindex
maxdex
standard_deviation
sample_range
Statistics::Descriptive::Full
----------------------------------
All methods above and:
get_data
sort_data
presorted
percentile
median
trimmed_mean
harmonic_mean
mode
geometric_mean
frequency_distribution
least_squares_fit
Ideas for ongoing development:
- re: Georg Fuellen
A function to define the "maxima" of a distribution. In other words,
return an array that contains all data that falls within a given
confidence interval.
- Move source to C and XS for speed improvements. (Interface to R or S?)
- Move to PDL for a unified math solution and maybe take advantage of
their compact storage.
- Methods for covariance and correlation.
- An interface to Jon Orwant's Statistics::ChiSquare module to
provide a method for determining how random data is (for a uniform
distribution) or how well is fits another distribution (for
non-uniform distributions like normal(gaussian), log-normal,
rayleigh, etc).
The major issue I'm concerned about is the updating of someone else's
code and future extensibility. Now, major paranoia should be obvious
since Jon hasn't changed Statistics::ChiSquare for a long, long
time. Still, a wrapper module that inherits from several other
modules is appealing. Perhaps it will be called Statistics::Bundle.
