Hi All,
Thanks Manti, Nick and others who responded to the query. I am not sure I
will need to apply many of the things mentioned in Mantis mail just yet!.
But it is very helpful, and coming from someone who has experience of both,
it is valuable. Here is another response I got in private.
....
" I don't use either, but I asked someone here a while back why he selected
Matlab. Here's his reply. I'd be curious to see what other opinions you
uncover. There are three reasons that I chose to use Matlab over MATA. The
first and biggest is that though I've used MATA in the past, I was far from
an expert in the language while the person I am working with is a matlab
expert. The second reason is that I could not find any information on Mata's
ability to perform computations on sparse matrices (I read that it could not
do this, but they may have updated it since that was posted). Due to the
massive amount of computations I would be performing, I needed this
capability to cut down on running time. This makes a huge difference: in
matlab it cuts a 4 minute run time to 13 seconds (and this was for a small
to medium sized computation, the big ones would take hours or days).
Finally, I think matlab is far more user friendly; though I've been using
stata exclusively for the past five years and consider myself to have a very
solid background in it, I still find it's documentation confusing and
frustrating. Additionally, matlab has an incredible editor which
automatically points out errors in your code and makes suggestions of more
efficient ways to do things."
...
Thanks again
Rajesh
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Nick Cox
Sent: 07 July 2008 18:31
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: st: Mata versus Matlab
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?
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
