This seems a very fair summary from what I know. I'd add that Stata and
MATLAB have a major similarity as proprietary software but with many
user-written extras available freely and publicly.
I'd be interested to know more details of how "it is sometimes easier to
trick MATLAB than Stata into producing unsupported graph types". That
would be a challenge either for Stata graphics programmers to show how
such types can be supported or as agenda items for StataCorp. I
specifically exclude 3-D graphics where -- to my great regret -- it is
clear that MATLAB is currently superior to Stata.
Nick
[email protected]
Michael Manti
Rajesh,
I've used both Stata and MATLAB reasonably extensively. Stata is my
main tool for statistical work. I've used MATLAB to do statistical
work, but I've used it mostly for financial simulations. I much prefer
Stata over MATLAB for statistical work.
For my purposes, the biggest disadvantage of MATLAB over Stata/Mata is
cost. If you want to use MATLAB as your main tool for statistical
work, you need to pay up for the Statistics and Optimization (and
perhaps other) toolkits. All MATLAB toolkits are sold separately,
whereas Stata bundles many procedures, and many more are downloadable.
Even then, my guess is that you're much more likely to find a given
statistical procedure implemented in Stata (or R) than you are in
MATLAB.
Stata is much better than MATLAB for managing data, logging research,
and producing tables. For statistical graphics, I generally prefer
Stata's defaults over MATLAB's--tick marks that poke into the plot
area, ugh!--but it is sometimes easier to trick MATLAB than Stata into
producing unsupported graph types.
I suspect that more numerical routines are available in MATLAB than in
Mata. MATLAB the language also supports some nice programming
abstractions--higher-order functions, lexical scoping, arrays of
higher dimension than 2, etc.--that Mata lacks. Mata's pointers only
partially make up for these omissions. However, I really appreciate
Mata's optional type declarations, which have saved me from boneheaded
errors on occasion.
Rajesh Tharyan
> Does anyone have any extensive experience of using both of these? If
> so what
> are the advantages of Mata over Matlab or vice versa? Or is there a
> good
> reference on comparison of capabilities?
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