

Wizard for Mac - a tool for statistics and data analysis - harper
http://wizard.evanmiller.org/

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EvanMiller
Sorry for the poor audio quality in the video. Some random thoughts that may
be of interest:

1\. I've been in grad school for economics the last four years. The program
basically embodies all the things I've learned about econometrics, i.e.
applied statistics. Wizard does about 1% of the things that R does, but it
does them very, very well.

2\. Wizard is fast. All the tight loops are written in C. Wizard will use all
the cores on your Mac as well as the CPU's vector capabilities. This was
achieved with a combination of Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL. I highly
recommend both technologies. For my research I am using Wizard on data sets
with ~3 million rows, and it works like a champ.

3\. The main weaknesses of the program is that it does not deal with time-
series data particularly well, and you can't manually enter data. These
shortcomings will be addressed in future releases.

4\. The program is closed-source. I might make some of the libraries open-
source. Or I might not. I haven't decided.

5\. The non-Pro version will be released sometime next week.

6\. I have absolutely no regrets about not writing Wizard using JavaScript and
HTML5.

7\. [Edit] You can read a review of the pre-release version of the program
here: <http://www.macstats.org/reviews/wizard.html>

~~~
calinet6
This is very cool. The tutorial (the Wizard Wizard, if you will) was very well
done and I feel like the program makes a lot of basic stats analysis very easy
and visual. Nice work.

In your opinion how relevant would this be to survey analysis for psych and
social science research? Does it cover most of the analysis required or are
there shortcomings that, say, SPSS would better fill? I'm not a stats guy,
just a programmer, but it would be great to work it into our recommendations
for tools for researchers on Mac (shameless plug -
<http://www.socialsci.com>).

~~~
arrrg
Coming from a social science perspective, this tool seems to cover a lot of
bases. I haven’t used it for actual research (obviously), so it’s easy for me
to overlook shortcomings, but a lot of the important stuff seems to be there.
What I didn’t really see (but maybe I missed it) were good tools to edit and
clean up data (which often is a lot of tedious work and at least as important
as actually calculating the statistical tests) as well as factor and cluster
analysis (especially factor analysis is something that is used quite
frequently when looking at survey data) – but I think you can do most of the
stuff social scientists do with this tool.

I do not think it is a replacement for other tools (SPSS, R) but I do think
it’s excellent at what it does. I’m quite impressed, actually. Firing up SPSS
is just no fun (also crazy expensive), so I will definitely look into getting
this. (R is fun, but for some reason I’m very slow with it.) It’s definitely
very accessible.

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jonpaul
For the love of God... please put your video on Dropbox or S3. I don't think
your site can handle it. At least I'm having issues with it.

~~~
EvanMiller
Sorry about that. The HN traffic was unexpected. I will upload to Dropbox
ASAP.

~~~
EvanMiller
For future reference, uploading a video to Dropbox when you are on the HN
front page is a bad idea. My account was suspended almost immediately.
Switching to YouTube...

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macmac
502 Bad Gateway

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dmix
Seeing pricing >$50 for software products always makes me happy as a
bootstrapper.

It shows you trust the value your customers will put in your product.

~~~
fwr
$80 for something that is "Best for casual (...) users" is not really the
price I'd pay for a program I'd use from time to time to _casually_ crunch
numbers in.

And not like there's a free alternative out there that just blows Wizard out
of the water, right?

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Flow
There is? A link would make me happy.

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kome
<http://www.sofastatistics.com/>

~~~
Flow
Looks good. Thanks! I was aware of <https://gephi.org> since before, always
nice to have more tools in the toolbox. :)

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jonpaul
I just watched the video, nice work! I regularly deal with files that have
10,000,000+ records. How well does Wizard scale with large data sets?

~~~
EvanMiller
Thanks. I've been testing on 3-4M records on a quad-core laptop, and it works
great. I would guess that 10M records will be doable on an 8-12 core Mac Pro,
but I don't have access to one to test this particular hypothesis.

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sirwanqutbi
502 Bad Gateway. Links down.

~~~
EvanMiller
Sorry. It's back up.

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filip01
Just tried it out. Looks really good. Would be a perfect plug-in for Sequel
Pro for example. What other products are there in the same space (easy-to-use
statistics tools for Mac)?

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justindocanto
Getting a 502 error when i visit

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zmjones
Why pie charts dude?

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boggzPit
video!!! ;)

