Statistica is a suite of analytics software products and solutions originally developed by StatSoft and acquired by Dell in March 2014. The software includes an array of data analysis, data management, data visualization, and data mining procedures; as well as a variety of predictive modeling, clustering, classification, and exploratory techniques. Additional techniques are available through integration with the free, open sourceR programming environment. Different packages of analytical techniques are available in six product lines.
History
Statistica originally derives from a set of software packages and add-ons that were initially developed during the mid-1980s by StatSoft. Following the 1986 release of Complete Statistical System and the 1988 release of Macintosh Statistical System, the first DOS version was released in 1991. In 1992, the Macintosh version of Statistica was released. Statistica 5.0 was released in 1995. It ran on both the new 32-bit Windows 95/NT and the older version of Windows. It featured many new statistics and graphics procedures, a word-processor-style output editor, and a built-in development environment that enabled the user to easily design new procedures and integrate them with the Statistica system. Statistica 5.1 was released in 1996 followed by Statistica CA '97 and Statistica '98 editions. In 2001, Statistica 6 was based on the COM architecture and it included multithreading and support for distributed computing. Statistica 9 was released in 2009, supporting 32 bit and 64-bit computing. Statistica 10 was released in November 2010. This release featured further performance optimizations for the 64-bit CPU architecture, as well as multithreading technologies, integration with Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft Office 2010 and other applications, the ability to generate Java and C# code, and other GUI and kernel improvements. Statistica 12 was released in April 2013 and features a new GUI, performance improvements when handling large amounts of data, a new visual analytic workspace, a new database query tool as well as several analytics enhancements. Localized versions of Statistica are available in Chinese, Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. Documentation is available in Arabic, Chinese, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and other languages.
Statistica includes analytic and exploratory graphs in addition to standard 2- and 3-dimensional graphs. Brushing actions allow for investigation of outliers and exploratory data analysis.
User interface
Operation of the software typically involves loading a table of data and applying statistical functions from pull-down menus or from the ribbon bar. The menus then prompt for the variables to be included and the type of analysis required. It is not necessary to type command prompts. Each analysis may include graphical or tabular output and is stored in a separate workbook.
