Statistics programs

[DHMO]

I am getting involved with several clinical research projects and am looking to learn how to do some statistics. Anyone have any suggestions for which statistical analysis software would be the best/easiest to learn to use? I'm good at math/statistical concepts, but have little experience with writing computer code and I'd like to avoid coding as much as possible. I'm trying to decide between SAS, SPSS, and Stata, but if anyone has other recommendations, I'd love to hear about that as well. Thanks!

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[tbo]

The long and short is they all do the "basics" well. By basics of course I mean your typical frequencies, cross-tabulation univariate analysis, survival analysis, and regressions. Each of the packages start to diverge after that and have unique strengths and weaknesses. For example, forest and tree plots cannot be done in SPSS, but are relatively simple in SAS.

What I've found is use the one that your colleagues use - this is helpful for a number of different reasons. Software licenses, readability of output, cross-compatibility of data and output, etc are but a handful of reasons.

Sadly, to be rigorous (and efficient) at stats, you do need to learn some programming. What happens if you realize a variable was not defined appropriately and you have to re-do a series of 20 statistical tests? If you program, that's a 15 second affair. If you do not, your life may flash before you. More to your point, SPSS is very non-coding friendly vs SAS. I've never used Stata.

Hope that helps.

 

[relentless11]

I am getting involved with several clinical research projects and am looking to learn how to do some statistics. Anyone have any suggestions for which statistical analysis software would be the best/easiest to learn to use? I'm good at math/statistical concepts, but have little experience with writing computer code and I'd like to avoid coding as much as possible. I'm trying to decide between SAS, SPSS, and Stata, but if anyone has other recommendations, I'd love to hear about that as well. Thanks!

It depends on what you want to do. For beginners, I would go with MiniTab, you can download a free 30 day trial from www.minitab.com. SPSS also has a trial, but runs out after 15 days (or 15 uses...something like that). Ultimately, in terms of publishing papers, SAS is the way to go, and at the VERY least, I've seen SPSS appear every now and then. Therefore you should work towards becoming relatively proficient with SAS.

There are three weaknesses (from my limited experience) with MiniTab:

1) One weakness with MiniTab would be the way it runs ANOVA. Its data output isn't as nice as SPSS'. So when I run an ANOVA, I usually use SPSS. But for the typical t-tests, bland-altman plots, non-parametric statistics (Mann-Whitney, Kruskal Wallis, etc), I just run it on MiniTab for quick results.

2) The other issue would be multiple pairwise comparisons. It doesn't have a great deal of options such as the Bonferroni-Dunn which is more conservative in my opinion and thus a better way to compare results among the groups tested via ANOVA or Kruskal-Wallis. Howover it does have the Tukey's so that is a decent substitute.

3) The way it calculates P-values is another issue. Its not serious, but sometimes it may report P = 0.000, which one should NEVER report . SAS does a good job at giving a actual value. Of course you can always report the P = 0.000 as P < 0.001.

In regards to say logistic regression, I would REALLY go with SAS. Its a PAIN in the beginning to learn how to do it, but a quick google search can yield the lines of code that you would need to run such analyses. MiniTab and I assume SPSS also have the ability to do logistic regression, but for the most part, when I ran this type of regression, I went with SAS.

Now in terms of cost, SAS is probably the most expensive, and MiniTab is the cheapest. You can get a lifetime license for MiniTab for $100, or a 5 month license for some smaller amount. I think SAS is only a year long license. I have not looked into getting SPSS.

So back to my first statement: what do you want to do? If you're doing simple comparisons of means/medians, then SPSS or Minitab may suffice. SAS may be overkill. But if you're doing logistic regression, poisson regression, etc, then yea you'll need SAS for that. Additionally if you want to do some kind of epidemiological study, then I think SPSS is good too. Our MPH students seem to stick with SPSS more.

One last thing to consider is what do people use the most? Beginners (e.g., students, some researchers) use MiniTab and SPSS. However I can guarantee that biostatisticians primarily use SAS. So if you ever consult with a biostatistician, then it may be helpful to show them your SAS readouts, and they can help you with the results or lines of code if anything went wrong. Hope that helps!

 

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[mendel121]

I am getting involved with several clinical research projects and am looking to learn how to do some statistics. Anyone have any suggestions for which statistical analysis software would be the best/easiest to learn to use? I'm good at math/statistical concepts, but have little experience with writing computer code and I'd like to avoid coding as much as possible. I'm trying to decide between SAS, SPSS, and Stata, but if anyone has other recommendations, I'd love to hear about that as well. Thanks!

A very typical program for people in biostats to use is R - it's free but has all the benefits of being reliable and accurate like SAS. R is a computer language, and so would require some programming and learning, but so would SAS. R has the benefit of being open, so that people that have had problems that R couldn't handle have written packages that are freely available to handle all sorts of really specific problems. So R would definately be my recommendation.

As a side note - whether you use SAS or R, you should spend some time learing perl - a simple programming language that is sooooo useful for processing large amounts of data and re-formating, etc. Perl is one of those things you can learn on your own and on the job you don't need a class or anything, just a day or so practicing and google-ing. Good luck.

 

[DHMO]

Thank you all for your helpful replies! I am doing some mutivariate logistic regression--does R work okay for that? Also, any suggestions for websites or books that are particularly good for learning perl? thanks.

 

[mendel121]

Thank you all for your helpful replies! I am doing some mutivariate logistic regression--does R work okay for that? Also, any suggestions for websites or books that are particularly good for learning perl? thanks.

I haven't done logistic regression with R, but I know it does it - here is a list of all the packages that are available in R, and the R documentation -

http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/PACKAGES.html

As far as perl goes, I didn't do much from books, I learned from web tutorials like these -

http://perldoc.perl.org/index-tutorials.html

If you're a book person though - try any of these books, they're all good (the first two and the Cookbook especially)-

http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/li.../ref=cm_lm_dp_l_1/102-8566215-9329733?ie=UTF8

Good Luck, have fun.

 

[Faebinder]

The easiest software to use.... even easier that SAS and SPSS...

Graphpad.

www.graphpad.com I use it all the time...

They also got Graphprism for survival curves but it's only does Logrank tests.

If you want a serious software that does everything (almost) then you probably need XLstat.

Try graphpad... it's insane how easy it is. (No I don't belong to the company... I bought the software just like everyone else... well worth my 150 dollars but they do have a demo version).

 

[sparticus]

Any suggestions for a macintosh/apple statistics program that is relatively cheap for a med stud starting clinical research? Thanks

 

[relentless11]

Any suggestions for a macintosh/apple statistics program that is relatively cheap for a med stud starting clinical research? Thanks

Ouch..haha, this is why you get a PC. I'm more of a PC user, but I also have a Macbook Pro that can boot up with Windows XP, so I suggest you look into that route. Most of the mainstream programs such as MiniTab and SAS appear to be exclusive to Windows platforms. However I believe SPSS works on MacOS X.

I understand that money is tight when you are a student, but in the long run, learning how to use at least minitab (if not SAS) is good if you plan ot do clinical research. On a side note, if you're just going to run t-tests and descriptive statistics, MS Excel can run it without any problems. However I wouldn't call Excel as publication grade software.

As cool as Macs are, I have come to realize that many of the programs that I deal with at least (statistics, engineering, and pharmacokinetics) appear to favor windows platforms for better or worse. Hope that helps!

 

[CrusaderMedic]

STATA has a version available for Macintosh.....it's on the expensive side, but very capable once you learn to use the interface. I got introduced to it while taking Biostats and have been using it for everything else since.

 

[flamingo]

JMP is really user-friendly and can do quite a bit! I use it all the time. A good choice if you don't want to invest much time...might want to learn another program if you're planning on making a career out of stats though, haha.

 

[Modanq]

R is for niggs only. If you want to be a baller Go for R.

 

[bwells46]

I am getting involved with several clinical research projects and am looking to learn how to do some statistics. Anyone have any suggestions for which statistical analysis software would be the best/easiest to learn to use? I'm good at math/statistical concepts, but have little experience with writing computer code and I'd like to avoid coding as much as possible. I'm trying to decide between SAS, SPSS, and Stata, but if anyone has other recommendations, I'd love to hear about that as well. Thanks!

All three are good. I've worked with SPSS and STATA and, on the average, I found SPSS easier to use. However, it lacked STATA's capability with doing cross-sectional time series.

 

[Josh1977]

Hi,
I found this: software that specializes in logistic regression (it is for windows only). It doesn't have all stat features and has some documentation problems but it is pretty much straight forward.
http://www.appricon.com/index.php/downloads.html

BTW: it is called analysis studio

 

[unimaginative]

While this thread is really old I figured I'd add this anyway for future readers.

I was in the same boat as the OP. I was trying all sorts of different online calculators, free packages to do some analysis for a research paper.

I decided to get serious and now I started using SAS. I have some ancient programming experience but you don't neccesarily need it. SAS has an embedded program which lets you run anything from simple to complex stats analysis without coding, called Analyst. You can also make lots of graphs. There is also a good user guide online authored by SAS, http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/anlystug/58352/HTML/default/chap1_index.htm. You can easily do multivariate regression with Analyst with ZERO coding.

In the medical literature SAS is definitely the most cited in the methods section as someone else mentioned.

If you are in any way associated with a university I bet the U. has paid for liscences so you can download and run a copy of SAS on your own computer. It may require you to use VPN and/or Key server but that's no big deal. I am a medical student and downloaded a copy of SAS and run it with VPN/Key server for free.

SAS is seriously amazing and definitely full of features but also with Analsyt program totally accesible for a newbie.