GNU Octave in education: an insight beyond engineering into statistics and data analysis

<p>GNU Octave is programming language intended for numerical computations. Often quoted as the MATLAB open-source clone or alternative, Octave has been in constant development for more than three decades already. Hundreds of engineering departments worldwide and tens of thousands of student have benefited from this free and open source software. Traditionally, Octave has been primarily targeting engineering applications due to its advanced computational capabilities with multidimensional arrays. Complementary to the core Octave capabilities, there has been Octave Forge, which for a long time served numerous packages extending Octave functionality for various domain-specific engineering applications. Since 2022, there has been a shift towards expanding the Octave ecosystem beyond engineering applications. This coincided with the development of Octave Packages, a new package indexing system that facilitates the development and integration of Octave package within the Octave ecosystem. This shift is most prominent by the recent advancements of the statistics package as well as a number of other packages focused on data analysis and visualization. This talk aims at a concise presentation of the current state of the Octave ecosystem with a special attention to the educational aspects and its benefits for educators and students alike. The talk will focus on statistics and data analysis with GNU Octave, and discuss its educational benefits in these two widely popular fields. https://octave.org https://gnu-octave.github.io/packages/ https://github.com/gnu-octave/statistics https://github.com/pr0m1th3as/datatypes</p>