MINISTAT(1)						    BSD General Commands Manual 					       MINISTAT(1)

NAME

     ministat -- statistics utility

SYNOPSIS

     ministat [-ns] [-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, stan-
     dard input.

     The options are as follows:

     -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, default is 74.

     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 sta-
     tistical 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 exam-
     ple.

HISTORY

     The ministat command was written by Poul-Henning Kamp out of frustration over all the bogus benchmark claims made by people with no under-
     standing 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.

BSD
								   June 28, 2010							       BSD