Discussion about stat consulting, stat packages, applied statistics and data analysis by statistical consultants of Academic Technology Services at UCLA. Please leave your comments or send us email at stattalk at ats.ucla.edu

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Data Archives has a new home!

We wanted to let everyone know that UCLA's ISSR Data Archives has moved to its new location in Rolfe Hall. Please visit Libbie and Marty in 1120-H Rolfe Hall to see their ever-growing collection of data sets. At present, Data Archives has about 29 thousand files comprising about half a terabyte of data. That is really impressive! So if you are looking for a data set to use for your Master’s thesis, dissertation, or just for fun, visit Data Archives on the web or in Rolfe Hall and see what they have. Although the location of their office has changed, their website is still at the same URL: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/da and their phone number is still the same:
(310) 825-0716.

-crw

Friday, May 16, 2008

New additions to our web site

The ATS Statistical Consulting Group is proud to announce two new additions to our web site. First, we have completed most of the textbook examples for Applied Survival Analysis, Second Edition by Hosmer, Lemeshow and May. We have completed most of the examples in most of the chapters in SAS, Stata and SPSS. We will start doing the examples in R as time permits. If you are familiar with the first edition of this text, or if you are interested in survival analysis, we think that you will find this book very useful. To see the examples, please visit http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/examples/asa2/default.htm .

The second big addition to our website is a series of movies featuring Professor Muthen describing, explaining and illustrating new methods for latent variable modeling in Mplus 5.1. Cool new methods include exploratory structural equation modeling and a new method of handling missing data. There are several movies that you can watch by visiting http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/mplus/seminars/whatsnew_in_mplus5_1/default.htm .

Besides all of this, we have also added several new FAQs, some dealing with the analysis of spatial data and others dealing with the explanation and interpretation of two-way and three-way interaction terms in regression.

We hope that you find these new materials useful! Enjoy!

-crw

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Patch work

We are sorry that the blog has been quiet for so long! It isn't because nothing has been happening, but rather because so much as been happening. There will be some nice additions to our website soon, so stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, let's talk about patches for statistical software. In general, we recommend applying the patches that vendors provide for their products, as they usually contain fixes for known bugs and may contain new features or improve the performance of the software.

Three programs for which there are recently released patches include SPSS, HLM and SUDAAN. The latest SPSS patch, which upgrades SPSS version 16 to version 16.0.2, contains many important bug fixes. If you are running SPSS version 16, please be sure to visit the SPSS website, download and install this patch. A patch for HLM upgrades version 6 to version 6.06, and the patch for SUDAAN upgrades version 9 to version 9.0.3. All of these patches can be obtained free of charge from the respective vendors' websites. You can also visit http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stat_pkg.htm for more information and relevant links.

We would also like to mention that an upgrade for Mplus will be available soon. That will make the current version of Mplus version 5.1. From what we hear, this upgrade contains some very nice enhancements to version 5, so you will want to watch for it.

- crw

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