This book describes an interactive statistical computing environment
called 1 XploRe. As the name suggests, support for exploratory
statistical analysis is given by a variety of computational tools.
XploRe is a matrix-oriented statistical language with a comprehensive
set of basic statistical operations that provides highly interactive
graphics, as well as a programming environ- ment for user-written
macros; it offers hard-wired smoothing procedures for effective
high-dimensional data analysis. Its highly dynamic graphic capa-
bilities make it possible to construct student-level front ends for
teaching basic elements of statistics. Hot keys make it an easy-to-use
computing environment for statistical analysis. The primary objective of
this book is to show how the XploRe system can be used as an effective
computing environment for a large number of statistical tasks. The
computing tasks we consider range from basic data matrix manipulations
to interactive customizing of graphs and dynamic fit- ting of
high-dimensional statistical models. The XploRe language is similar to
other statistical languages and offers an interactive help system that
can be extended to user-written algorithms. The language is intuitive
and read- ers with access to other systems can, without major
difficulty, reproduce the examples presented here and use them as a
basis for further investigation.