Those of you who were receiving this newsletter in its earlier incarnation will have read about MVSP - A MultiVariate Statistical Package (described in issues 4 and 10). For those who missed it, MVSP performs a number of analyses commonly used in Quaternary palynology. These include several types of eigenanalysis ordinations: principal components (PCA), principal coordinates (PCO), and correspondence/detrended correspondence analyses (CA/DCA). It can also perform cluster analysis, using nineteen different distance or similarity measures and seven clustering strategies. Clustering can be stratigraphically constrained, a feature which is very useful in Quaternary work. Diversity indices may be calculated on ecological data; these include Simpson's, Shannon's, and Brillouin's indices.
Development work on MVSP continues and a Windows version is nearing completion. It will be available later this year. Besides the modernized user interface, the new MVSP will have improved graphics, a greatly expanded data matrix size (up to 2 billion rows and columns!) and will perform canonical correspondence analysis, in which environmental data can be ordinated along with the species data, giving a direct gradient analysis.
Last year I teamed up with Normand Peladeau (Montreal, Canada), the author of SIMSTAT, the inexpensive shareware statistics program for DOS. This program calculates a wide variety of general statistical tests, including basic stats, anova, regression (linear, non-linear and multiple), time series analysis, various nonparametric analyses and bootstrap analysis.
I became a distributor of SIMSTAT and, more importantly, we worked together to link the MVSP and SIMSTAT programs. This allows the user to run the powerful multivariate analyses of MVSP from within SIMSTAT, using the same data files and user interface as when running SIMSTAT's analyses. The combination of these two programs gives you much of the power of the big commercial statistical packages, but at a fraction of the cost.
SIMSTAT has an add-in menu that allows a number of programs, including MVSP to be run. When MVSP is selected from that Add-in menu, a second menu is displayed, allowing you to choose the basic analysis desired (see Fig. 1).
SIMSTAT can import Lotus, dBase, SPSS/PC+ and ASCII files and it has its own data editor for entering new data. It also has a number of powerful data manipulation functions, such as recoding and variable transformation, to make it the ideal system for maintaining your data files.
A Windows version of SIMSTAT is in beta-test and will be released very shortly (perhaps by the time you read this). It will retain the link to MVSP for DOS, allowing you to run MVSP analyses under Windows. When the Windows version of MVSP is released it too will work with SIMSTAT for Windows.
The combined package of MVSP and SIMSTAT for DOS is available at the special price of GB£99 (US$149) plus shipping & handling (a 10% savings over the separate prices). Full descriptions and shareware versions of both programs, plus the SIM2MVSP utility needed to tie the two together, are available from my Web pages at: http://www.compulink.co.uk/~kovcomp/ (Do not forget the ~ and the final / !). If you would like any more information please contact me.