Development of a friendly, self-teaching, interactive statistical package for analysis of clinical research data. The...

We have developed a new statistical analysis package for use by the clinical investigator, the clinician, and the laboratory researcher. This package attempts to implement the following philosophy: The programs should be essentially self-teaching, friendly, and forgiving; the programs should educate the user regarding the underlying theory, assumptions, and interpretation of the statistical methods involved; the programs should automatically test relevant assumptions and warn the user when these assumptions appear to have been violated; the programs should make recommendations about the availability of alternative statistical methods and automatically perform such analyses when indicated; the programs should interpret the results; and the programs should mimic, insofar as possible, the logic used in a routine, elementary statistical consultation. Several programs have been developed, extensively tested, and used.