on 23/01/2003 10:09 pm, David Vaughan at [email protected] wrote:
> I have subscribed to this list because Stata 8 is on my short list of
> possible statistical packages for use under OS X 10.2 and I wanted to
> get a feel for what the users are finding about the product. I have
> used Data Desk (versions 4 to 6) for eight years but must either wait
> ages for a new version under OS X, continue using Data Desk in Classic
> mode (unhappy) or choose something else like Stata or JMP or the like.
Can I wade in here and say that I think Stata and JMP are an ideal
combination. I used Data Desk for many years, but started using JMP when I
had to identify a really cheap package (the student version is a mere fifty
euros!) that was oriented towards data exploration. JMP is really splendid -
it encourages you to reason your way through your data, and you always see a
graphic in the output, always at the top! I use JMP extensively to check on
the shapes of variables and relationships (the interactive smoothing and
density curves are very useful indeed). It runs elegantly on OS X, too. (The
student version only runs on classic, but is still a really amazing buy - a
SAS sales rep told me sadly that they simply charged Thompson Learning too
little for the rights, and SAS cannot compete with their pricing!)
That said, Stata contains two orders of magnitude more of statistical
sophistication than JMP. You can conduct a finely-nuanced analysis in Stata,
especially with real-life data, which typically has horrible properties like
clustering, over- or under-dispersion, zero inflation, truncation, censoring
etc. I recently had to model the relationship between PSA (a marker of
prostate cancer) and age. While JMP was great at detecting nonlinearities
(which are very important in setting 'normal ranges'), I switched to Stata
as soon as I was sure of the shape of the relationships, since my aim was
not to model the mean, but to model key quantiles.
I regard JMP as my diagnostic imaging package and Stata as my therapeutic
armamentarium.
Ronan M Conroy ([email protected])
Lecturer in Biostatistics
Royal College of Surgeons
Dublin 2, Ireland
+353 1 402 2431 (fax 2329)
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