We Got Mail (Part 2)

I thought that I would talk a bit today about which stat packages are used by the ATS Statistical Consulting Group and how we select that software.

The statistical software that we support is determined by which software is used by researchers here on the UCLA campus. Just to be clear on things, there is no central administrator or committee decides which statistics software is used on campus. Each researcher, research group or department decides on their own what software they want to use.

Let's begin with general purpose statistical packages. The big three on our campus are SAS, SPSS and Stata. SAS and SPSS are legacies from the mainframe days. When I started at UCLA the top three were BMD, SAS and SPSS. BMD has dropped by the wayside and Stata has come on strong in the last seven or eight years. In addition to research usage, many departments teach their methodology courses using one or more of these stat packages.

After the big three there is R which has a smaller but very strong following. We do not get many people coming into consulting asking for help using R. I think this is due to the fact that many of the R users are relatively advanced and do not need a lot of consulting assistance. Another reason is that our group does not have lot expertise in using R. Since we don't get many question we haven't developed the expertise needed to support R at the level it deserves.

After SAS, SPSS, Stata and R there are a number of statistical packages that have a small number of users. The numbers are too small for us to invest the time and effort needed to support the software. These packages include JMP, StatView, Statistica and Datadesk. If I had written this a week ago, I would have said that there aren't any Minitab users on campus but one walked in last Thursday with a question. Fortunately, it was a more general statistical question and not something specific to Minitab. We don't have Minitab and we don't know how use it.

As for JMP, I do have a copy and have played with it some. It does some things very nicely, in fact, it does some things easily that are difficult in other packages. My opinion, based primarily on total lack of esperience, is that it might not be the best package with which to manage and analyze large research databases. If JMP grows in popularity on campus and achieves a significant number of users we would support it along with the other stat packages.

We also occasionally get a MATLAB user coming in with a question. Most of these users seem to be writing their own data analysis programs and so we can only provide limited help. I tend to lump MATLAB, Maple and Mathematica together as programming environments as opposed to traditional data analysis programs which is not to say that you can't do data analysis with them.

Then there are the special purpose statistical software packages including Mplus, EQS, LISREL, HLM, MLwiN, SUDAAN, LIMDEP, WinBUGS, LEM and LatentGOLD. We try to know a little bit about each of these, where the strengths and weaknesses lie. Different consultants in our group have differing levels of skills in these programs so clients may have to wait a bit to talk to someone with more specialized knowledge.

I need to mention one program that is invaluable to us, StatTransfer. In our line of work we could not function without this program. It allows us to move data seamlessly from stat package to another. I believe that DBMS/Copy functions in a similar manner.

Finally, I need to talk a bit about the cost of statistical software. Its expensive, even at the university discount rate. Some people think that because we are with UCLA that either we get everything for free or that we have an unlimited budget for software. Not so. Well, not completely so. In the interest of full disclosure: We do get one courtesy copy of Stata and a number of licenses for SPSS in some years. For the big three and several of the specialized packages we need licenses for all our consultants and for our lab machines. For other stat software we may only have a single copy, such as, JMP. Or, even no copies, as in the case of Minitab. Every time someone suggestion a new statistics program we need to determine if our budget can accommodate it. There is a lot of interesting statistics software that we cannot justify purchasing.

Well, that's the story on what we use in our Stat Consulting Group. I am working on a new blog entry tentatively titled, "What's the Best Stat Package." Look for it in a week or so.

pbe