Statistics with Stata

February 1st, 2011

I do a fair amount of statistical analysis and for many years stuck with SAS, which was used for the majority of my coursework. Over the past year, I’ve made the switch to Stata, which has several key advantages:

  • It runs natively on my Mac, obviating the need for running VMWare Fusion.
  • It’s much easier to use, particularly with respect to viewing and editing data
  • It’s much faster to get to actually analyzing data (no need to put everything in the context of a “PROC” like SAS.
  • High quality graphics are much easier to generate (no more ODS).

The only disadvantage has been that I don’t know my way around Stata as well as I do SAS. However, I’ve begun to collect shortcuts and command listings. Since I expect others may be in the same situation as me, I’ve made a page summarizing useful information: Stata for Clinical Research. I hope to add to this over time.

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  • Andrew

    Ishir, why not use R instead? Much more powerful/flexible to use than SAS (or Stata) with better graphical output.

  • http://twitter.com/infobhan Ishir Bhan

    Part of it is that Stata is so easy. There’s great documentation, it behaves like a proper application, the syntax is straightforward. I’ll give R another look, but I found it cumbersome in the past. It may be just a learning curve issue…can you visually edit the data in R?

  • Andrew

    What do you mean by visually editing the data? Do you mean directly interacting with graphs/data by pointing and clicking? There may be packages that allow you to do that, but you can’t do that right out of the box.