Introduction

Statistics is fundamentally concerned with the understanding of structure in data. One of the effects of the information-technology era has been to make it much easier to collect extensive datasets with minimal human intervention. Fortunately, the same technological advances allow the users of statistics access to much more powerful ‘calculators’ to manipulate and display data. This book is about the modern developments in applied statistics that have been made possible by the widespread availability of workstations with high-resolution graphics and ample computational power. Workstations need software, and the S1 system developed at Bell Laboratories (Lucent Technologies, formerly AT&T) provides a very flexible and powerful environment in which to implement new statistical ideas. Lucent’s current implementation of S is exclusively licensed to the Insightful Corporation2, which distributes an enhanced system called S-PLUS.