Interactive Statistical Analysis tool

Question

I'm looking for a basic software for statistical analysis. Most important is simple and intuitive use, getting started "right out of the box". At least basic operations should be interactive. Free would be a bonus :)

The purpose is analysis of data dumps and logs of various processes.

• Importing a comma/tab separated file
• sorting and filtering rows on conditions
• basic aggregates: count, average, deviation, regression, trend
• visualization - plotting the data,bin distribution etc.

Excel fails (at least for me) for the filtering and re-combining data, I guess something like "Excel with SQL" would be nice. I've been using MS Access + Excel and copying around data before, but that's a pain.

Do you have any recommendation?

Clarification I am not looking for a specific tool for IIS/web server logs, but various data end event logs (mostly from custom applications) with tab-separated values.

Answer 1

Specifically for Log file analysis I would recommend Microsoft's Log Parser(free), which will allow you to run queries with basic aggregation against all types of text based files (and across sets of files), XML, CSV, Event Log, the Registry, file system, Active Directory, etc..

There is also a free GUI build on top of it called Log Parser Lizard GUI which makes it more user friendly and can do basic graphing etc.

Answer 2

I used Tableau Software at a previous gig, and it's pretty amazing - extremely intuitive and easy to use.

Unfortunately it's also pricey.

Answer 3

You might find gretl very useful (thanks GNU !!!)

http://gretl.sourceforge.net/win32/

Answer 4

I would consider looking at R, it is:

• Free
• Widely used by statisticians
• Fairly easy to use.
• Can easily do everything you mention in your post