Scilab and Octave

[Marko]

Hi Guys,

Have you tried out Scilab or Octave? Please share your experience. Are they as good as Matlab?

Thanks,
M

 

[alain]

Octave was slow when I tried it in comparison to Matlab. There is somebody in my group that plays with Scilab also but so far he says it doesn't compare to Matlab.

However, after we discover R we haven't gone back to Matlab. Ever.

 

[bigbadwolf]

They're much slower in simulations than Matlab. They're excellent products otherwise, particularly considering they're free.

 

[Joy Pathak]

MATLAB is amazing. R is good because its free. The great thing about MATLAB is the fact that almost everything you can think of is already done.

I used MATLAB extensively through my engineering education/career and absolutely loved it. Simulink of MATLAB is really great too for algorithmic stuff.

 

[alain]

MATLAB is amazing. R is good because its free. The great thing about MATLAB is the fact that almost everything you can think of is already done.

No, R is good because almost everything that you can think of is already done... in more than one way. It's also FREE. It has a wonderful community and new funcionality is added to it all the time.

 

[Joy Pathak]

No, R is good because almost everything that you can think of is already done... in more than one way. It's also FREE. It has a wonderful community and new funcionality is added to it all the time.

There are several methods to the same problem in MATLAB too that can be found extensively.

MATLAB has a huge community, probably one of the largest. New things are always added to MATLAB too. R being free is a huge advantage as MATLAB is super expensive. I got the student version for my birthday, but I could never have access to the full version other than at university terminals.

But...I have not used R much. Just a bit here and there a while back. Maybe I should explore it more.

 

[alain]

a little bit off topic but there is good push to run R in HPC sort of environments plus there are also GPU based packages as well.

 

[Marko]

Hi Alain, I agreed that Octave is slow. I am trying to test it with Netbeans as a plugin. I am using R also. The function is sufficient enough to construct model.

 

[alain]

The function is sufficient enough to construct model.

In R? what kind of model? Take a look at the Finance task view from CRAN.

http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Finance.html

 

[Marko]

Time Series

In R? what kind of model? Take a look at the Finance task view from CRAN.

http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Finance.html

Models related to time series analysis. Thanks for the input.