Generally speaking, IMHO, making the <i>interface</i> easier, in practice, doesn’t actually make <i>using statistical methods correctly</i> easier and that’s scary.<p>SPSS is a classic example - and the social sciences have had a series of discredited papers over recent years due to poor application of statistical methods. Just because you can put a dataset in and get values out - even values that <i>look</i> significant, it doesn’t mean they are - did all of the assumptions and requirements of the methods/tests you used hold true/pass with your data?<p>So, while I haven’t looked closely at this tool, all I saw was talk of the interface and the ease of getting results even if “you don’t know where to start”. That scares me. Especially when you start talking about applications in domains like medicine. That could be lives in the balance. Would we want civil engineers using tools like this to build bridges? Or people designing nuclear reactors?<p>To me, this is worse, not better unless it somehow helps you actually understand when, why and how to correctly use these tools.
I own a copy of Wizard and have found it valuable on numerous occasions from digging around databases to tinkering with models. It handles non-trivial amounts of data with relative ease, allows you to do joins in the UI, has nice graphical representations that can change based on the type of the column. The list goes on. It does quite a lot of stuff.<p>Everyone I show this software to goes: "Whoa, what is this?" I would recommend checking it out before dismissing it.
Robust statistical analyses require knowledge, judgement, and increasingly, specialist expertise. To market a product as a way to jettison the statistician is so shortsighted as to be intellectual malpractice.<p>Forgive me if I seem overly aggressive but I have grown weary of my and my colleagues' profession being side-lined and belittled. Politicians, administrators, and even some other scientists see statistics as merely a badge to be placed atop their own work for validation. Well, ladies and gentlemen, statistics is more than that. It is an empirical science in its own right.<p><pre><code> Of course, it doesn't always take a statistician to do the necessary statistical work. I am no physicist yet I can certainly apply the Clausius Clapeyron equation as needed. Likewise, I expect many (perhaps most) scientists to be able to apply an ANOVA or simple regression as the need arises.
HOWEVER, the lack of intellectual humility on the part of so many non-statisticians when applying statistical tools to their own work is maddening.</code></pre>
I don't understand the hostility to this application. Progress comes from trying different ways to do things. I tried this program a few years back, and thought it was ok. It is easier to use than JMP, which some others have mentioned, though not as powerful.<p>There is nothing about easy-to-use that precludes understanding, and certainly nothing about difficult-to-use that promotes it. They are largely orthogonal. Using R doesn't make you a statistician, any more than using C++ makes you a software engineer. If anything, a simple interface can reduce the number of ways you can shoot yourself, and leaves more time to focus on the problem.<p>Being easy-to-use may be the difference between some analysis and no analysis, or at best, analysis by spreadsheet.<p>And finally, this is Hacker News. The author wrote this software and makes some money off it. Great. Isn't that what this place is all about?
Wizard is an awesome tool for initial investigation and initial slicing and dicing of incoming data. For trying out ideas and seeing if what you're "seeing" in the data might be worthy of further investigation and hypothesis testing.<p>It isn't R, SPSS or Minitab. It's brilliant at what it does and I love it. I've been using it for 3 / 4 years and wouldn't swap it for any other tool.
I don't understand this program. It states it is a statistics program but on the front page only test stated is " Shapiro-Wilk". I don't know how many here are familiar with statistics, but that is basically the hello-world thing for statistic tests. Also the pricing puts this program directly at the range of Graphpad's Prism, which is widely-used in academic fields other than the field of statistics, and quite intuitive.<p>Making good-looking figures nowadays is not a selling point anymore. If one's willing to script rather than clicking-the-mouse, Prism, Igor Pro, Origin Pro, Matlab (pricing from low to high) all can produce great figures and solid statistical test for people out of the statistics field. But nothing these days beats R for versatile of statistical tests.
If you are willing to defer dismissing this tool out of hand as a p-value generator, you can get a better feel for how the author (Evan Miller) thinks about stats from his web site [1] and a presentation he gave [2]. I think you'll find that "Wizard" is not the product of whimsy.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.evanmiller.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.evanmiller.org/</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzJMFxj7GRI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzJMFxj7GRI</a>
> Trial versions never expire. They do not report p-values, and cannot save or export. Requires OS X 10.10 or later.<p>Maybe this makes the trial versions better?
Apart from being literally the opposite of where I think statistics should be headed (i.e. I see the notion of "removal of 'complicated statistics knowledge'" to be more dangerous than helpful), I also had some practical feedback from watching the 12 minute intro video.<p>-Firstly, how does the visualization know the respective population or sample size from which the summary statistics and intervals are to be drawn?<p>- The demo used a pie chart to try to display summary stats and confidence intervals from the general social survey. Aside from professional statisticians general dislike of pie charts, you cannot plot confidence intervals in this way into a pie chart just by inserting 'more white space between the slices'. There's only 100% of the area of the circle that you've got to play with, so any attempt to increase the 'white space' between the slices necessarily warps the real estate remaining to represent each actual slice.<p>- Honestly, I see this tool likely to be used by people who participate in the practice of p-hacking, whether deliberately or not. The ability to throw lots of simple models quickly at lots of data mindlessly reporting some notion of statistical significance is dangerous. I'm assuming your stats are not (cannot) be adjusted in any fashion to implicate what you're really doing by using an automated model-building/reporting regime in this way (potentially running heaps of models on heaps of data until you find one that appears 'significant' based on a statistical test designed under the assumption that this is NOT what you're doing). No where did i see any application of train/test, sample/resample type methods to try to control for over-fitting in the prediction application or truly estimate how predictive/replicable such a technique would be in the real world.<p>While I appreciate the work done required to put something like this together (a lot of it looks like a gui interface to my own exploratory functions/scripts in R, for example), i genuinely believe this approach is more dangerous/likely to lead to false conclusions than helpful.
I video if it in action would be really helpful. Just reading the landing page its hard to know how im supposed to use it. "Just click and explore" isnt very convincing.
Since other comments on this thread have complained about missing screenshots. Some can be found here: <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wizard-statistics-analysis/id495152161?mt=12" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wizard-statistics-analysis/i...</a>
There is a video link at the very bottom of the page. It'll take some hazard to fall onto it. I'm not going to download a program and figure out how to use it.<p>Why not have the video at the top. Maybe pop right on my face. Actually, these are moments when I'd not mind a popup that takes focus out of a page.
SPSS user here, I run a bunch of surveys in Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey, and frequently use their export to SPSS file functionality.<p>Often, I have questions that take the format of "for each of the following categories please rank them between strongly disagree and Strongly agree". The way these questions end up in the SPSS files are typically as different variables for each row, and a 1,2,3,4, or 5 as the measurement along with the labels.<p>Frequently, I want to pivot those types of questions by a variable like Region or Number of Employees (categorical), and then see the resultant tables. This is never fun, and inevitably takes a lot of time.<p>As others have said, statistics is a careful business that doesn't necessarily warrant ease of access to all mathematical functions BUT, handling what SPSS calls "Multiple Response Sets" better would be a godsend, just for the data prep and visualization step. I still ultimately fall back on recoding these or leveraging the MRS functional in SPSS to get this done (sometimes this is better than just using pivot tables in excel).<p>It would be great to be able to specify this kind of thing in this program, since without it, you can't really use/trust the computed percentages in some question configurations. Take a real look at the SPSS Tables feature, the Multiple Response Sets, and then visualization of them, and consider how that data is actually coded in SPSS files (the common export of survey tools) and maybe you can improve on that feature (It shouldn't be hard, MRS is a pretty bad setup, but it gets the job done).
Just had a quick skim of the site and saw no screenshots just a load of marketese. Next I head to the HN comments: some preach FUD, others are stauch defenders. It seems very few speak from experience of actually using this application. It seems a lot of the discussion stems from the poor marketing than anything else.
I'd recommend some screenshots or the video before you get to pricing.<p>Some of the graphics need to be improved. It would also be great to see why this is better than tradition BI tools (Tableau etc) and what your unique value proposition is.
Is this close sourced? I'm not using a statistics package I don't trust or that I can take apart to see what's wrong when it's returning weird results.
> PS- Wizard is only available for Mac, but if you’re reading this on a PC, consider this: for the price of high-end statistics software, you can buy Wizard and still have enough money left over for a top-of-the-line MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. Amazing, isn’t it?<p>Wow, that's a great way to kill off any sympathy for him. Especially given that he's apparently had 4-5 years to dig himself out of that hole.