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Mirza
Asked: 2018-12-09 21:38:00 +0800 CST

How to use GNU Octave instead of Minitab

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As a university student, we have to solve some problems and class activity using a Windows app called Minitab, while I don't use any other operating system except Linux.

I installed GNU Octave and statistics package, but when I searched for any tutorial or manual I failed to find out how to plot charts like P chart, Z-MR chart, XBar-S, etc. with GNU Octave. I want to know if it's possible to accomplish the same tasks with GNU Octave for statistical analysis and plotting charts?

octave plot statistical

2 Answers

  1. R is a system for statistical computation and graphics. It consists of a language plus a runtime environment with graphics, a debugger, access to certain system functions, and the ability to run programs stored in script files.

    The core of R is an interpreted computer language which allows branching and looping as well as modular programming using functions. Additionally, several thousand extension "packages" are available from CRAN, the Comprehensive R Archive Network, many also as Debian packages, named r-cran-<name>. For R an extension (library) R Commander exists, which brings a GUI to perform most things that Minitab is capable of.

    To install R and RStudio in all currently supported versions of Ubuntu open the terminal and type:

    sudo apt install r-base libopenblas-base libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 libgstreamer0.10-0 libjpeg62       
cd ~/Downloads  
wget -c --tries=3 --timeout=120 https://download1.rstudio.org/rstudio-xenial-1.1.419-amd64.deb  
sudo apt install ./rstudio-xenial-1.1.379-amd64.deb
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  2. I've also done a uni module where Octave was needed (Applied Linear Algebra) I am not familiar with minitab but I have also used MATLAB which is basically a proprietary version of Octave. Octave could do anything MATLAB could do with a slightly different syntax. I am thinking minitab may be similar along that situation in comparison. I am not sure of the level of complexity of your course...for EG very very basic in stats you can define a matrix by

     a = [0.9, 0.7;                 -define matrix
      0.1, 0.1;
      0.5, 0.4]; 
 b = [1; 2; 3]                  -define coefficients

    This should look familiar (if not, oi vey):

    For plotting charts/graphs (2-D) mostly fplot is used..e.g.

    fplot (@cos, [0, 2*pi])
fplot ("[cos(x), sin(x)]", [0, 2*pi])

    would define the equation the graph uses but they must be continuous.

    These are all very simple expamples so you should read the Octave Manual

    Hope this helps =]

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