glmlab was first written in 1995 to emulate some of the features of GLIM (Aitken et al. [1], Francis et al. [6]), industry standard software for analysing generalised linear models. However, GLIM is an expensive program to purchase (even student editions). Since MATLAB is inexpensive in student editions (especially considering its capabilities) and is a widely used numerical computation package, MATLAB was considered an ideal platform in which to perform the analyses performed in GLIM. glmlab does not attempt to replace packages such as GLIM and S-PLUS (Statistical Sciences [9]), but rather to bring the world of generalised linear models to the MATLAB environment.
glmlab uses a graphical user interface, which means very few additional commands need to be learnt to use glmlab. This manual discusses some of the basic skills needed to use glmlab. While it assumes some knowledge of MATLAB, there is a introduction to MATLAB in Chapter 2