Question

Choose one of the tools listed here that was not utilized in the course (SAS, R, or JMP,). Provide a brief description of this tool including its strengths and weaknesses. Describe a scenario where you would make use of this tool and explain why this tool would be preferred in that case.

Answer 1

I will write here abylut the statistical software R.

The main advantages of R-software are:

1) First and foremost, it is very much user friendly. The codes written here are easily understood, for example, seq() for creating a sequence, length() for calculating the length of a vector.

2) There are many packages available for R, each package contains multiple functions which again have thousands of options to customize. Also, R is an open source software. So, most of the times we are free from glitches. We also get time to time updates for new and existing packages.

3) Unlike SAS, R has collaboration with LaTeX also, which helps us to develop different reports. R also has graphical advantage. It has a whole package called ggplot2 which includes each and every aspect of graph designing.

Coming for the disadvantages:

1) The main issue for R is the computation time, which is sometimes huge. For example, if you have data over a certain limits, then R may stop working, or even if it works, it takes huge time to finish it off.

Other than the computation issue, R is good enough to carry out different analysis. For the computational problem, R is lagging behind the other softwares.

Use:

We may have to use R in many situation. Suppose, we have some data and we want to analyze them, develop graphs and put them in a report. While MS PowerPoint can do this job, but the pictures quality is very bad. In this scenario, R can generate much superior graphs with the help of ggplot2.

In my opinion, R can be used anywhere whenever our capacity is not being limited by the computation issue of R.