Matlab

Matlab http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab is, as its name implies, matrix laboratory. You might already be very familiar with it if you have an applied mathematics or engineering background. Although matlab provides a statistics toolbox, it is not a comprehensive statistical software. Its advantage lies on its fast and easy to use matrix computation which is far superior than SAS' interactive matrix language (IML) and S-Plus's matrix and array operations.

Matlab V6 is installed on stat network as well as vet. To start matlab, type command

matlab

You can also start matlab in text mode by adding option `-nodisplay'.

Sometimes you need to run matlab in batch mode. For example, you need to run some kind of simulation for several hours or days in background. In this case, you need to edit a command file with quit command at last, for example, a file named batch.cmd with content

for i in 1:1000, 
simulation(i) 
end 
quit

Then, you can start simulating with command

nohup matlab -r batch.cmd -nosplash -nodisplay > simulate.log &

The nohup command guaranteed that your process will not be killed after you log out.