Data Analysis & Simulation

Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category


Ordering Our Distribution Fitting Software on a CD

Friday, December 5th, 2008

From now on, our distribution fitting software EasyFit can be ordered on a CD, in addition to the download version. The motivation for adding this feature was that in some countries it is required for accounting purposes. Most times you won’t need a CD since EasyFit is available for immediate download from our website, but if you do need it, you might find this feature useful.

The CD will be produced exclusively for you, and will include the EasyFit installation package along with your personal license key and registration details in a separate file.

The CD is priced at $14.95, including shipping. To receive a CD, check the option “Order this product on a CD” and make sure you specify a valid postal address when filling in the order form. Once your order is processed, you will immediately receive your license key via email (so you can start using EasyFit right away), and the CD will be shipped to you in a few days.

EasyFit Available To Italian Customers Through SxST

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

We are glad to announce that customers from Italy can now purchase EasyFit, our distribution fitting software product, through SxST, the Milan-based company specializing in software solutions for science and technology.

SxST provides a wide range of scientific software products from recognized vendors to Italian businesses, government organizations and academic institutions. According to the agreement, SxST will be offering the Italian version of EasyFit and the first level support in Italian language to their clients, ensuring the best customer experience at the same cost as for the rest of EU countries.

It is really fascinating for us to see EasyFit standing in line with statistical software packages by Systat Software, Minitab, GraphPad, and StataCorp. Our partnership with SxST can be thought of as a milestone indicating that EasyFit has reached the quality level of brand name products offered by these long-established companies.

EasyFit 5.0 Released

Monday, October 27th, 2008

We are pleased to announce that a new version of EasyFit is now available for download.

EasyFit and EasyFitXL (distribution fitting add-in for Excel) now include support for 15 new probability distributions used in economics, finance, actuarial science, hydrology, communications theory, mechanical engineering, and other fields. To learn more about new features in this release, click here.

Upgrading From Previous Versions

If you purchased EasyFit on 23 October 2007 or later, you are entitled to a free upgrade, otherwise you qualify for a discounted upgrade. In either case, please contact us for upgrade information.

EasyFit 5.0 Coming Soon

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

It’s been a while since we updated our blog – that’s because we have been working on a new version of EasyFit planned to be released later in October 2008. Below is a quick summary of new features in EasyFit.

(Note: The price for the new version is likely to increase, but since all licenses come with one year of free updates, you can still order EasyFit at the current price this month and upgrade to the upcoming new version for free.)

New Probability Distributions

EasyFit will include 15 new distributions:

The Burr (Singh-Maddala), Dagum (Inverse Burr), Pareto Type II (Lomax), and Log-Gamma distributions are mainly used in economics and actuarial science. We have had numerous requests for these models from some of our customers – actuaries and finance industry professionals.

The Generalized Gamma distribution is an advanced 4-parameter model including the Gamma, Weibull, and Half-Normal distributions as special cases.

The Pearson Type V (Inverse Gamma) and Pearson Type VI (Beta Prime) distributions are a part of the Pearson family of distributions often used in financial applications.

The Levy distribution is one of the few distributions that are stable and that have probability density functions that are analytically expressible, the others being the Normal distribution and the Cauchy distribution.

The Log-Pearson III (often referred to as “LP3”) distribution is the standard model recommended by the U.S. Water Resources Council for use by all U.S. Government agencies for flood frequency analysis.

The Nakagami (Nakagami-m) and Rice (Nakagami-n) distributions are used in communications theory to model signal fading under specific conditions.

The Kumaraswamy distribution is used in electrical, civil, mechanical, and financial engineering applications dealing with variables that are lower and upper bounded.

Some other new models include the Hyperbolic Secant, Error (Exponential Power), and Reciprocal distributions.

New Excel Functions

In EasyFit 4.0, we added the ability to analyze probability data in Excel, which has proven to be quite a useful feature. EasyFit 5.0 (Professional Edition) extends this functionality by introducing several new functions making it even easier to use distributions in your worksheet models.

The DistFit function allows to fit a specified distribution to your data and display the resulting model right in a worksheet. This function can be useful if you already know the underlying distribution (e.g. the Normal model) and only need to estimate the distribution parameters. The return value of this function can be supplied to several other new functions such as DistPdf, DistCdf, DistRand etc. For example, specifying

=DistCdf(DistFit(“Normal”; B1:B100); 2)

in a worksheet will fit the Normal distribution to the data in cells B1:B100, and then evaluate the CDF of the resulting Normal distribution at x=2.

EasyFit 4.3 Released

Friday, June 6th, 2008

This is a maintenance release which fixes a bug in EasyFit Professional causing Excel to crash under certain conditions. All users of EasyFit 4.x experiencing this problem can upgrade to EasyFit 4.3 by uninstalling the old version and installing the new one.

Standard and Professional Editions of EasyFit

Monday, May 5th, 2008

Starting from version 4.2, EasyFit is available in two editions: Standard and Professional. Both editions include the stand-alone application allowing to fit probability distributions to data, view distribution graphs and properties, perform probability calculations, and make projections/estimates. On top of that, the Professional edition includes the EasyFitXL add-in enabling you to use most of these features right in Excel (compare the editions).

The Standard and Professional editions are delivered as a single download: the installation package will ask you which edition of EasyFit to install. If you install the Professional edition, EasyFitXL will be automatically configured to work with your copy of Excel.

We offer a range of licenses, including the Perpetual and Annual licenses, for both product editions. Academic users can purchase the Professional edition at a discounted price.

If you purchased EasyFit 4.0 or 4.1, and would like to upgrade, you should choose “EasyFit Professional” during the installation process.

Student and Academic Licenses for EasyFit

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

The Student License is a new, affordable license that can be purchased and used by students of educational institutions for homework, coursework, and other non-commercial purposes. This license expires in 12 months, starting from the purchase date.

On the other hand, if you need to use EasyFit for more than one year – for example, for PhD research, then the Academic License would be a more cost-effective solution for you, since it doesn’t expire and can be used for as long as necessary. We have been offering the Academic License for almost 2 years now, and during that time, we have received a lot of useful feedback from our customers. We appreciate any kind of feedback, both positive and negative, so if you have something to say about EasyFit, or would like to share how you are using it exactly, feel free to let us know.

EasyFit Subscription Licensing

Monday, March 24th, 2008

We are happy to announce that EasyFit is now available on a subscription basis, in addition to the traditional perpetual software licensing. The subscription licensing program enables you to legally use the full version of EasyFit for a limited period of time without the need for a large upfront investment. At the same time, you get access to the latest versions of the product and technical support.

Specifically, the Annual Subscription License allows you to use EasyFit for one year at a fraction of the Perpetual License price. We are also considering to offer additional shorter-term subscriptions such as semi-annual and quarterly licenses – please let us know if you are interested.

Why Subscription Software?
Outside the software world, the idea of charging customers per use or per time period is nothing new – consider your electricity or phone bills – because companies and individual users usually get paid monthly, they also prefer to spend monthly. Software vendors don’t want to get left behind and strive to offer “pay per use” and similar flexible pricing models. This approach has in fact been mastered by numerous online subscription sites that usually charge you per month.

The situation with desktop software is a bit different here: the customers are prepared to pay a relatively large upfront fee and optional annual maintenance fees due to historical reasons. After all, software users actually like to own the products they purchased. However, when it comes to large ticket items, there is a benefit in renting, or subscribing to, software products, which allows you to better manage your costs and save money in certain cases – for example, when you need the software for a short-term project.

There is also a positive side effect of subscription software: for a customer, it drives down the costs of switching to competing products, and thus motivates vendors to work harder on improving their software. Some large companies such as Autodesk already offer their rather expensive products on a yearly subscription basis as a cost-effective alternative to the perpetual licensing, and this is something other vendors should consider doing.

Save 25% On Distribution Fitting Software

Monday, December 24th, 2007

Starting 24 December 2007, we offer significant discounts for our distribution fitting software EasyFit. Depending on the license type, you can save up to 25% off the regular product price.

This is a limited time offer, valid until January 5, 2008.

Happy holidays!

EasyFit 4.0 Released

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

The new version of EasyFit introduces a number of features targeted at business users dealing with probability data analysis, modeling, and simulation. For a complete list of new features and fixes in EasyFit 4.0, please click here.

The free 30-day trial version of EasyFit is available for download.

EasyFitXL – EasyFit for Excel

Many businesses use Excel for their data analysis & modeling needs, and even though Excel provides only a basic set of statistical functions, it can be easily extended by installing third party add-ins. An add-in is a piece of software that integrates into Excel and allows you to perform specific tasks which are impossible (or hard, time consuming etc.) to do using Excel alone.

EasyFitXL is a new Excel add-in which ships with EasyFit and allows to use most of the features available in EasyFit right in Excel. With EasyFitXL, you can fit distributions to worksheet data, view distribution graphs, perform probability calculations, and generate random numbers without the need to run EasyFit (the stand-alone application).

The installation process of EasyFitXL is very straightforward: if you have Excel (version 2000 or later) installed on your computer, the EasyFit setup application will automatically install and configure EasyFitXL to properly work with your copy of Excel.

Once EasyFitXL is installed, it can be accessed from the main menu of Excel:

EasyFitXL Menu

In Excel 2007, it can be found on the Add-Ins page:

EasyFitXL Menu in Excel 2007

Along with the main menu commands, EasyFitXL provides a large number of functions which you can use in Excel worksheets and VBA applications to create advanced models dealing with uncertainty. The worksheet functions are divided into three large categories displayed in the Function Wizard:

EasyFitXL in the Function Wizard

The following worksheet and VBA functions are available for more than 40 probability distributions:

  • PDF (probability density function)
  • CDF (cumulative distribution function)
  • inverse CDF (quantile function)
  • hazard function (failure rate in reliability analysis)
  • distribution mean/variance/standard deviation
  • random number generation

These functions can be applied to solve a wide array of problems, ranging from simple probability calculations to Monte Carlo simulation.

EasyFit: select the best fitting distribution and use it to make better decisions. learn more
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