Use-Misuse of Statistical Packages

Abstract

For quite a long period, in spite of its tremendous development as an indispensible discipline, its application was restricted mainly because of the fact that many of the statistical theories require knowledge of mathematics and extensive calculation. The quick and continued increase in computing facilities particularly after the second half of the twentieth century has tremendous impact on the use of statistical tools. Instead of almost linear models, nonlinear and multivariate statistical tools have been used to a greater extent. With the advancement in computing facilities, the use of statistics has increased manifold. Starting from the era of manual facit to modern supercomputers through desk/pocket/scientific calculators and different generations of computers, the computing facilities have increased tremendously. With the ever increasing facility, the use of different statistical theories in various fields which were not feasible earlier has become possible nowa-days. Statistical theories are more extensively used nowadays to make the data more and more informative. Like a coin having two faces, the development of statistics and computing facilities is also not unidirectional or flawless. Statistical theories and the set of data are best informative at the hands of a good statistician with an appropriate computing facility. The knowledge of both statistics, the subject concern where statistics is to be used, the data, and the computing facility available are the important contributory factors to unearth the hidden information in a set of data. The absence of any one of these will lead to misinformation. In this chapter main emphasis have been to highlight the use and misuse of computing facilities in statistical applications.