Really concise notation for statistical analysis: m <- lm(y ~ wage + degreeAttainment + jobTenure, data = mydataset) summary(m) plot(m) predict(m, myotherdatas

Really concise notation for statistical analysis: m <- lm(y ~ wage + degreeAttainment + jobTenure, data = mydataset) summary(m) plot(m) predict(m, myotherdataset) Things like heteroskedasticity-robust hypothesis testing, GLM, time-series models are supported without purchasing extra packages or coding it yourself. The graphics are much better and lattice/trellis plots are supported natively (I don't think there's any good way to them in matlab). Basically, the stats and graphics are easy enough to type that you can do all of the exploratory data analysis that you (should) feel guilty for skipping when you use matlab. :)