[R] Fwd: Re: [friday topic]: what exactly is statistical com

[Mervyn G Marasinghe]

Ted:

I agree with what you and Richard have to say on this topic but 
disagree with your time frame. I would like to believe that rudiments 
of what we call statistical computing today started long before the 
mid-seventies. Most probably it goes back to the mid-fifties.  There 
is a book that is long out of print "Statistical Computation" edited 
by Milton and Nelder  (a copy of which I am privileged to 
possess)  of the proceedings of a meeting  held at the University of 
Wisconsin in April 1969. The list of contributors read like a who's 
who of statistical computing. To name a few: Box, Chambers, Dixon, 
Golub, Hartley, Hemmerle, Kruskal, Massey, Nelder, Wilkinson etc.. I 
know for a fact  they have been doing research on statistical 
computing for a while before 1969! I am also pretty sure that the 
work on  BMD programs at UCLA by Dixon and Jennrich preceded 
Genstat  and Glim by many years because they were working on it in 
the mid-sixties. And they weren't using software; they were writing 
them. Just my bit. Take care.

Mervyn


  At 04:53 PM 3/2/2007, you wrote:
>On 02-Mar-07 Richard M. Heiberger wrote:
> > This is a very fascinating discussion topic.  I find I run into
> > some fundamental differences in interpretation of the phrase
> > "statistical computing".  I think of it as writing programs or
> > functions, such as R or packages in R, and of understanding the
> > numerical analysis behind these functions.
> >
> > I exclude USING computer programs, such as R, for data analysis
> > from my definition of statistical computing.  I see that as doing
> > statistics. I have had students, some sent by other faculty members,
> > in my class on statistical computing thinking they were going to
> > learn how to do statistical analysis using the computer.  There
> > was a clash of expectations between what they thought they were
> > taking and what I had in the syllabus.
>
>It is indeed a fascinating topic, and I agree with the implications
>of Richard's views above.
>
>Though computing machinery (from Brunsvigas with manual crank-handles
>upwards) has been used for doing the computations of statistics
>since the year dot, statistical computing (in my view of it)
>did not begin to develop until much later.
>
>I think the first developments which could be recognised as
>"statistical cmputing" (as opposed to using computers to do
>statistics) were the pioneering GENSTAT and GLIM (1973-4,
>though developed over some years previously). Possibly
>what characterised them for this was the fact that their
>programming language was recognisably statistical in flavour,
>and the commands triggered computational procedures in which
>statistical algorithms were implemented.
>
>Then, as the science of computer programming developed, and
>became more generalised, with "structures", "methods" and
>all the rest, so these concepts were implemented for statistics.
>The result of a computation was a data-structure, which could
>be recognised by any method that was capable of dealing with
>
>It's perhaps hard to say when S was actually born: perhaps
>passage to the outside world began with its port to UNIX
>in 1979, though it was conceived around 1975. But it must
>be acknowledged that in its adaptation of advanced (for the
>time) programming methods to statistics was a breakthrough
>in statistical computing.
>
>A quite early simple instance of this kind of programming
>was SPIDA (Statistical Program for Interactive Data Analysis)
>which was developed prior to 1988 -- since Dan Lunn & Don McNeil
>issued a SPIDA User's Manual in 1988 (and perhaps grew out of
>NcNeil's approaches described in his 1977 book "Interactive
>Data Analysis: A Practical Primer"), followed by the book
>
>   Computer-Interactive Data Aanalysis
>   A.D. Lunn and D.R. McNeil (Wiley 1991)
>   (with a couple of 5.25" DOS floppies with the SPIDA software)
>
>which I remember using with pleasure!
>
>So I see this confluence of the evolution of computational
>concepts and techniques through the 1970's and 80's, with
>the development of statistical modelling techniques and
>their implementation in software, as the core of "statistical
>computing".
>
>Best wishes to all,
>Ted.
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------
>E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
>Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
>Date: 02-Mar-07                                       Time: 22:53:33
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