Performing Inferential Statistical Analysis with PHP

This is the continuation of a two-part article in which we cover the use of PHP to calculate descriptive statistics. In this article, we will go deeper, using PHP to do inferential statistics. This is a completely different area of statistics in the sense that inferential statistics deals with the comparison of data at a certain level of statistical significance.

In other words, if there are at least two data sets that are being analyzed and compared with each other, we are dealing with the inferential side of statistics. What is the importance of doing this in PHP? After all, we can do this using Excel, right?

The short answer to this question is the benefit you gain from doing it in PHP. I'm referring to complete interactivity online using the most common web servers (for example Apache).

It is not simple to upload an Excel worksheet and make it completely interactive and compatible with Apache. PHP, on the other hand, is the main server side scripting language for Apache.

Of course, I emphasized this already in the first part. You can run Excel online, but doing so brings a little bit of complexity to the equation, and may cause security issues.