Show HN: Statwing is statistical analysis, simplified

I'm glad to see other people working on this problem. We (Wolfram|Alpha) are doing this too, starting out with the making the 'easy cases' nearly automatic.<p>Here's a blog-post describing our effort: <a href="http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2012/02/09/launching-a-democratization-of-data-science/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2012/02/09/launching-a-democrat...</a><p>You can also play around with our examples without having to sign up to Wolfram|Alpha Pro. My favorite is an automatic analysis of the Titanic data that nicely illustrates that while the motto "women and children first" applied, being rich certainly helped: <a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+&#38;examplefile=1&#38;datasetfile=DataInput%2Fcategories-numbers-genders&#38;examplefile=1&#38;datasetfile=DataInput%2Fcategories-numbers-genders" rel="nofollow">http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+&#38;examplefile=1&#38...</a><p>We cover other kinds of simple analysis and visualization too, like heat maps, Venn diagrams, graphs, and so on. As always, feedback welcome.

The walkthrough took me through finding a correlation between voting preference and neuroticism. Great! But it's also worth noting that this dataset shows <i>larger</i> effect sizes at similar CIs for the correlation between [preference and age] and [age and neuroticism]. This, folks, is why ANOVA is important.<p>That aside, the product was clear, fast, and intuitive. Well-chosen visualizations and a clean emphasis on the important moments for basic covariate analysis. Well done.

I do a lot of stat. analysis and I was impressed with the clarity of the analyses. However, I ran through the Obama v. Romney tutorial and was surprised to see that the software was averaging survey items (Likert-scale data). I thought that this was not allowed since it is troublesome to interpret the output (how do you interpret 8.36 Neuroticism?)<p>Aside from that, I can see this filling a need for those whom are aware of the importance of statistical significance but do not have the time to look up the appropriate analysis function in R/SAS/SPSS/...

There was a company that applied to YC that wanted to do the "Google Docs for Statistics" but was rejected. They wrote about it in a blog post but I can't find it. They ended up not launching.<p>It will be worth it to connect with these people to see if there is anything that can be learned from them.

Looks really great overall - props! One small design thing in there that bothered me was how the gradients reverse in the buttons on hover - this should never happen. Just lighten or darken the color on hover (move the gradient up with background position and add a transition is a good trick), then consider reversing the gradient on active (or just adding an inset shadow).<p>Everything else in the design looks great and this is totally nitpicky, but hope it helps!

Very nice. One tip: Don't require an email address to provide feedback and you'll get more feedback.<p>A bug that I found in the tour for "Politics and the Big 5":<p>The instruction bubble says: <i>To run a different analysis, remove "Neuroticism" from the white box by clicking the X to the right of the variable name.</i> But, "neuroticism" is not one of the variables I was using. It seems that something was hard-coded when it shouldn't have been.

This looks great and I look forward to running some analyses of the same test data between Statwing and Wolfram|Alpha Pro in a mini-bakeoff.<p>EDIT: Can you talk about your business model any? Sort of a freemium service, or maybe charging for a future API, or something along those lines? Please don't say "ads".

Very nice. Who's the target audience for this? Students? Curious enthusiasts? Analysts within companies?

A statistics application that run on the cloud and looks good too? Yes please! Looking forward to playing around with the data to see what's possible. Where are you guys planning to take this software?

I'm worried for how quickly you can do tests with this interface. I feel my fingers urging for hypothesis hunting---do you have multiple comparison corrections in place?

I can do everything they can do in matlab with your data in less time and with less hassle. my only price is a xmen comic book and a 6 pack of coke.

Similar to what Swivel was trying to do. Great idea, nice execution, but really how will you monetize this? There is no real market for consumer grade "intuitive" statistical software. While this will appeal to casual data analyzers, these users arnt ready to spend much money on tools. And those doing data analysis for a living prefer their power tools: R, SAS, Matlab, NumPy, etc.

Are there any plans to add-in any realtime feeds? Like say weather data and the Dow jones close to see any correlations?

While I appreciate the graphs, I'd also like to see the numbers if I hover over wording that says "Very clearly significant". What confidence interval are we talking about? 95%?<p>If I was you, I'd hide this information from the average user but make it available in a tooltip to those of us who care.

The optional upgrade survey appears to be broken. After I submit the survey, I get redirected back to the login page with my username in the query string. After I click "login", I get the alert telling me I can take a survey to upgrade. Rinse. Repeat.

I absolutely love this. I'm learning to code (slowly) and have an infatuation with data visualization. I've imagined what something like this might look like, and I think you guys absolutely nailed it. Well done!

Very cool. Why should I use this instead of R/gnuplot?

I'd like to throw in another vote for prioritizing regressions and specifically adding logistic regressions to the mix. Thanks!

demo is very cool. love anything that can make pattern recognition in large datasets this much easier.

1. Great looking product. I clicked through a little bit and liked the general polish, but didn't have time to explore everything.<p>2. For people whose jobs involve statistical analysis, how much need is there for something like this? The more analysis I do, though, the more I realize that the hard part is collecting the data and programmatically "piping" it from package to package...And from professionals I know in various numbers-based industries, their biggest blind spot seems to be that ability to gather data that doesn't come in a CSV/Excel sheet for them.<p>* edit: in addition to the challenges presented above, the challenge of cleaning data so that a package like Statwing can do a proper analysis

looks really awesome. interested to see what if any data analysis can be linked to current events.

"Female tends to have slightly higher values for Neuroticism than Male"