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+## Copyright (C) 1995, 1996, 1997  Kurt Hornik
+## 
+## This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
+## it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
+## the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
+## any later version.
+## 
+## This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
+## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
+## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
+## General Public License for more details. 
+## 
+## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
+## along with this file.  If not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
+## 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
+
+## usage:  S = statistics (X)
+##
+## If X is a matrix, return a matrix S with the min, first quartile,
+## median, third quartile, max, mean, std, skewness and kurtosis of the
+## columns of X as its rows.
+##
+## If X is a vector, treat it as a column vector.
+  
+## Author:  KH <Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at>
+## Description:  Compute basic statistics
+
+function S = statistics (X)
+  
+  if (nargin != 1)
+    usage ("S = statistics (X)");
+  endif
+
+  if (prod (size (X)) > 1)
+    if (is_vector (X))
+      X = reshape (X, length (X), 1);
+    endif
+    for k=1:columns(X)
+      S(:,k) = [min (X(:,k)); empirical_inv ([0.25;0.5;0.75], X(:,k));
+	 	max (X(:,k)); mean (X(:,k)); std (X(:,k));
+		skewness (X(:,k)); kurtosis (X(:,k))];
+    endfor 
+  else
+    error ("statistics:  invalid argument");
+  endif
+  
+endfunction