Chapter 7. More Examples: Data Analysis
Octave is an ideal tool to perform many different types of data analysis. The data can be generated by other programs or be collected from a database and then loaded into Octave's workspace. The data analysis tools in Octave are based on a truly impressive arsenal of different functions. We will only discuss a few of them here, namely, how to perform the simplest statistical analysis, function fitting, and Fourier (or spectral) analysis using the fast Fourier transform.
In brief terms, upon reading this chapter, you will learn:
More about the ASCII file formats that can be loaded into Octave's workspace.
How you can use Octave to perform simple descriptive statistics.
About fitting different functions to data.
How to use Octave to perform Fourier analysis.
Loading data files
When performing a statistical analysis of a particular problem, you often have some data stored in a file. In Chapter 4, it was shown how you can save your variables (or the entire...
