Is there a free (or cheap) Matlab equivalent for statistics work?

Question

Hi,

I am looking for an easy and not expensive solution to work on a large amount of records coming from sensors and save in a MYSQL database.

I would like to do statistics calculation on these records and other heavy calculation.

this tool that I am looking for will be used by researchers or engineers who are expert in math and statistics but not in computer sciences. It can be in command line interface or a GUI.

I know that Matlab could be a good solution but it is too expensive for us. I also heard that Python could be a good alternative but it is maybe too developer oriented...

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

GNU Octave at www.octave.org is very good and almost completely compatible to the commercial competitor.

That said, GNU R at www.r-project.org is even better for serious statistical work. There are some document outlining the differences between Matlab and R at the contributed documentation page.

Answer 2

R: http://www.r-project.org/

Answer 3

Octave's goal is to be a sort of open-source version of Matlab.

R is more statistically oriented and I believe has packages to connect to a number of databases.

NumPy which is a package for Python brings a lot of Matlab like functionality (and then some!) to Python and there are certainly python bindings for connecting to MySQL.

These aren't all equivalent -- some may be better suited to your specific tastes or application, if you're familiar with Matlab, Octave or NumPy would be easy to pick up; Octave syntax is nearly identical to Matlab syntax.

Answer 4

I haven't tried this myself, but I remembered this blog about someone replacing Matlab with Sage (a wrapper around Python and other packages).

http://vnoel.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/bye-matlab-hello-python-thanks-sage/

Answer 5

Sage is based on Python and one of its goals is a MATLAB alternative.