Assessing the reliability of web-based statistical software (Q1424635)

Performance of freely distributed web-based software packages WebStat and Statlets is compared with performance of SAS, SPSS, SPlus and Microsoft Excel. The base\,10\,log relative error (LRE) is evaluated for these packages on datasets from the Statistical References Datasets Project of American NIST. Algorithms of descriptive statistics, analysis of variance and linear regression are compared. The authors' conclusion is that WebStat is more reliable then Statlets; they both overperforms Microsoft Excel 97 but are less reliable than S-Plus.