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One of these may be better than the other to learn the math underpinnings depending on what kind of statistics you are planning to do. Overall it is more likely that a statistical package is the best software as the primary tool for most statistical purposes. There will of course be differences in different fields, but in my experience over 30 years using many packages I've come to the following position. Using this set of desiderata [human factors of the user interface, clarity and transparency and consistency of language, wide availability, user documentation, documentation of what was done (to facilitate review), point-and-click aid in reading output, readability of output, ease of data transformation especially the most common tasks, ease of transfer of data to/from other packages, numerical accuracy, a wide variety of non-esoteric stats ], SPSS has no peer. To further put this in context:: In common with many other applied statisticians I feel that at least 80% of the time, and as much as 95% of the time in a analysis is quality assurance: cleaning, prepping, doing descriptives, finding miscodes and other outliers, and getting a basic understanding of the data. I place a premium on the effectiveness and efficiency of this portion of the effort. Only a small percentage of researchers in fields such as psych, ed, nursing, sociology, political science, public administration, business, market research, etc. need stat methods that are not in SPSS. The situation is not as clear in other fields, but SPSS has done the job for me for on specific jobs in ops research, inventory evaluation, astronomy, biology, and ecology. However, a statistician/researcher sometimes needs to do less common tasks. It is easy to ouput cleaned and prepared data to many other programs. Many (e.g. SUDAAN, (I think) WESVAR, and some SEM programs) can read an SPSS system file since SPSS makes its interface available. These and Stata, S, EQS, Statistica, LISREL, LIMDEP, SAS, etc. and stand-alone single purpose programs can be useful parts of one's statistical s/w repertoire depending on the application area. On rare occasions it is necessary to program in FORTRAN or other languages. "Andreas K." wrote: > Maple or Mathematica? Which of these CAS programs is the best one to > use for a statistician? --------------2586F275B26CD6A7B663CE05 Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit <!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> <html> One of these may be <b>better</b> than the other to learn the math underpinnings depending on what kind of statistics you are planning to do. <p>Overall it is more likely that a statistical package is the best software as the <b>primary</b> tool for most statistical purposes. <br>There will of course be differences in different fields, but in my experience over 30 years using many packages I've come to the following position. Using <b>this set</b> of desiderata [human factors of the user interface, clarity and transparency and consistency of language, wide availability, user documentation, documentation of what was done (to facilitate review), point-and-click aid in reading output, readability of output, ease of data transformation especially the most common tasks, ease of transfer of data to/from other packages, numerical accuracy, a wide variety of non-esoteric stats ], SPSS has no peer. <p>To further put this in context:: <br>In common with many other applied statisticians I feel that at least 80% of the time, and as much as 95% of the time in a analysis is quality assurance: cleaning, prepping, doing descriptives, finding miscodes and other outliers, and getting a basic understanding of the data. I place a premium on the effectiveness and efficiency of this portion of the effort. <p>Only a small percentage of researchers in fields such as psych, ed, nursing, sociology, political science, public administration, business, market research, etc. need stat methods that are not in SPSS. The situation is not as clear in other fields, but SPSS has done the job for me for on specific jobs in ops research, inventory evaluation, astronomy, biology, and ecology. <p>However, a statistician/researcher sometimes needs to do less common tasks. It is easy to ouput cleaned and prepared data to many other programs. Many (e.g. SUDAAN, (I think) WESVAR, and some SEM programs) can read an SPSS system file since SPSS makes its interface available. These and Stata, S, EQS, Statistica, LISREL, LIMDEP, SAS, etc. and stand-alone single purpose programs can be useful parts of one's statistical s/w repertoire depending on the application area. On rare occasions it is necessary to program in FORTRAN or other languages. <p>"Andreas K." wrote: <blockquote TYPE=CITE>Maple or Mathematica? Which of these CAS programs is the best one to <br>use for a statistician?</blockquote> </html> --------------2586F275B26CD6A7B663CE05-- . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
