Re: st: Mata versus Matlab

[Michael Manti <statboy3000@gmail.com>]

Excellent point about the proprietary-software-with-freeware- 
extensions similarity, Nick.

With regard to graphics, I was thinking principally of some of the  
idiosyncracies of --graph combine--. The interactions among the  
various areas, labels, etc. are sometimes hard to predict-- 
particularly with regard to lining up elements across constituent  
graphs. My recollection was that this is more predictable in MATLAB. I  
wish I had an example at hand of a graph that was easier to produce in  
Stata than MATLAB to illustrate my meaning. The fault may well lie  
with me rather than with Stata.

Another minor advantage that MATLAB graphics have over Stata's is that  
MATLAB supports a limited subset of TeX in text elements of graphics.  
Last I checked, this is not the case for Stata. I suspect that a  
workaround for PostScript graphics may be the LaTeX psfrag package.

Michael Manti

On Jul 7, 2008, at 1:30 PM, Nick Cox wrote:


> 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
> n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk
>
> 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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