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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

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