DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages
MINISTAT(1) DragonFly General Commands Manual MINISTAT(1)
NAME
ministat -- statistics utility
SYNOPSIS
ministat [-Ans] [-C column] [-c confidence_level] [-d delimiter]
[-w [width]] [file ...]
DESCRIPTION
The ministat command calculates fundamental statistical properties of
numeric data in the specified files or, if no file is specified, standard
input.
The options are as follows:
-A Just report the statistics of the input and relative
comparisons, suppress the ASCII-art plot.
-n Just report the raw statistics of the input, suppress the
ASCII-art plot and the relative comparisons.
-s Print the average/median/stddev bars on separate lines in the
ASCII-art plot, to avoid overlap.
-C column Specify which column of data to use. By default the first
column in the input file(s) are used.
-c confidence_level
Specify desired confidence level for Student's T analysis.
Possible values are 80, 90, 95, 98, 99 and 99.5 %
-d delimiter
Specifies the column delimiter characters, default is SPACE
and TAB. See strtok(3) for details.
-w width Width of ASCII-art plot in characters. The default is the
terminal width, or 74 if standard output is not a terminal.
EXAMPLES
A sample output could look like this:
$ ministat -s -w 60 iguana chameleon
x iguana
+ chameleon
+------------------------------------------------------------+
|x * x * + + x +|
| |________M______A_______________| |
| |________________M__A___________________| |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
N Min Max Median Avg Stddev
x 7 50 750 200 300 238.04761
+ 5 150 930 500 540 299.08193
No difference proven at 95.0% confidence
If ministat tells you, as in the example above, that there is no
difference proven at 95% confidence, the two data sets you gave it are
for all statistical purposes identical.
You have the option of lowering your standards by specifying a lower
confidence level:
$ ministat -s -w 60 -c 80 iguana chameleon
x iguana
+ chameleon
+------------------------------------------------------------+
|x * x * + + x +|
| |________M______A_______________| |
| |________________M__A___________________| |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
N Min Max Median Avg Stddev
x 7 50 750 200 300 238.04761
+ 5 150 930 500 540 299.08193
Difference at 80.0% confidence
240 +/- 212.215
80% +/- 70.7384%
(Student's t, pooled s = 264.159)
But a lower standard does not make your data any better, and the example
is only included here to show the format of the output when a statistical
difference is proven according to Student's T method.
SEE ALSO
Any mathematics text on basic statistics, for instances Larry Gonicks
excellent "Cartoon Guide to Statistics" which supplied the above example.
HISTORY
The ministat command was written by Poul-Henning Kamp out of frustration
over all the bogus benchmark claims made by people with no understanding
of the importance of uncertainty and statistics.
From FreeBSD 5.2 it has lived in the source tree as a developer tool,
graduating to the installed system from FreeBSD 8.0.
DragonFly 5.5 March 15, 2019 DragonFly 5.5