principal component analysis (2 products)

PickStock 1.6 (Demo, $49)

PickStock (copyright 2003, Bell Software and Services, Inc.) uses principal components analysis to search out potentially underpriced stocks by analyzing a user-supplied database of historical stock prices. The program is believed to be an implementation of what is known in the financial market modeling community as 'arbitrage pricing theory' (see for example S. Ross, 'The arbitrage theory of capital asset pricing', J. Economic Theory, vol. 13, pp. 341-360, 1976). The theory postulates that a given vector of prices (for example, today's price for a set of stocks) can be explained by a linear combination of underlying economic components. While there is apparently substantial debate in the economic community as to the viability of the arbitrage pricing theory, this application provides a tool to test it out on real data.

statistiXL 1.4 (Shareware, $75)

statistiXL is a powerful new data analysis package that runs as an add-in to Windows versions of Microsoft Excel. statistiXL has been entirely designed and written by scientists in order to meet the demanding needs of anyone requiring access to a robust, versatile statistical analysis package that is quick to learn and easy to use. With its wealth of features, Excel provides an ideal environment for data input, manipulation and calculation and by leveraging this familiar environment, statistiXL greatly extends this feature set to encompass high powered statistical analysis without the need to learn how to use an entirely new application from scratch. Data stored in existing spreadsheets can instantly be subjected to a wide range of statistical tests (many frequently not seen in other analysis packages). Tests provided by statistiXL include (but are not limited to), Analysis of Variance, Cluster Analysis, Contingency Tables, Correlation (Simple, Partial, Multiple and Canonical), Linear and Circular Descriptive