subbotools

The package subbotools provides a set of programs for the Maximum Likelihood Estimation of the Subbotin and antisymmetric Subbotin families of distributions.

The package is composed of the following programs:

subbofit

finds the Subbotin density that better fit a given set of observations. The observations are considered independently drawn from the same probability distribution and the parameters value are obtained via maximum likelihood estimation.

subboafit

finds the asymmetric Subbotin density that better fit a given set of observations. The observations are considered independently drawn from the same probability distribution and the parameters value are obtained via maximum likelihood estimation.

subbolafit

finds the (less) asymmetric Subbotin density, i.e. an asymmetric density with a symmetric scale parameter, that better fit a given set of observations. The observations are considered independently drawn from the same probability distribution and the parameters value are obtained via maximum likelihood estimation.

subboshow

takes a set of observations as input and produces a graphic showing the value of the log-likelihood of this set as a function of the density parameters.

subbogen

generates random variables extracted from a Subbotin density. The relevant parameters can be provided on the command line or read from standard input.

subboagen

generates random variables extracted from an asymmetric Subbotin density. The relevant parameters can be can be provided on the command line or read from standard input.

These programs have been mainly written to be used from the command line. They read data from file or standard input in an ASCII format and print the result in ASCII format to standard output. The versatile gnuplot program is used as graphic back-end. When the output is intended to be graphically displayed, it has been designed in a format suitable to be sent to gnuplot for plotting.

Documentation:

For a description of the method applied and a brief tutorial on the use of the different commands see the subbotools documentation. The same documentation is available as PDF document.

For a step by step guide on how to install subbottols, together with gnuplot in a Cygwin environment, see the Cygwin Installation Manual.

Requirements:

• A C compiler and the standard C library. Unix-like environment in which GNU auto-tools can work is required for automatic installation.
• GNU Scientific Library (GSL) (version above 1.2).

Downloads:

The latest package version (tar.gz) contains the source code, installation instructions and the above documentations in pdf format.

Contributors:

Angelo Secchi provided helpful suggestions in the design of programs user interface and the Cygwin installation instructions.