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Statistical Freeware?

  • 25-05-2014 4:40pm
    #1
    Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,212 CMod ✭✭✭✭


    What are the best free statistical software programs available on the web? The university picks up my SPSS license fees, so I was clueless when asked this question at our locale javahouse yesterday.

    What are your experiences with statistical freeware? Any pros, cons, limitations, comments, specifications, and links would be helpful.


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Comments

  • Registered Users Posts: 2,551 ✭✭✭Squeeonline


    If you're using a Mac, you can use graphpad. There's a 30 day free demo, but deleting a certain file resets that clock.

    However, to the best of my knowledge no such "work around" exists on windows unfortunately.


  • Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 9,639 Mod ✭✭✭✭Manach


    I've used R when I needed to obtain results from statisical data. Free,supported by an engaged community so quite a number of modules and books to support it. A downside is not a user-friendly as some of the commercial packages and there is a learning curve.


  • Registered Users Posts: 242 ✭✭actuar90


    +1 for R
    Takes a while to get into the hang of it but very powerful when you do, I often prefer R to SAS/SPSS


  • Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 12,521 Mod ✭✭✭✭Amirani


    Yeah, I was thought R fairly exclusively in college. It takes a while, but eventually you start to love it (sort of). :)


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,483 ✭✭✭Ostrom


    I'm a stata user with an avowed hatred of R. For an end user like myself, stata's syntax is perfect and I'm happy for my institution to pay the license/upgrade fee every few years for the user support and documentation. However, I've recently started using the QCA module for R and am finding it.... ok. However it's completely un-intuitive to teach beginners with, especially for students who just want to run basic models on secondary data.

    Best free program that I regularly use is Gretl, which is brilliant for time series. http://gretl.sourceforge.net/win32/


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  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,212 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    Has anyone used OpenStat freeware developed by Bill Miller of Iowa State University?


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 31,967 ✭✭✭✭Sarky


    R is fiddly and not at all user friendly, but it's free and surprisingly powerful if/when you get the hang of it.


  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,212 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    Most everyone seems to be in favour of R stat freeware. Any other stat freeware alternatives that may compete with R? Perhaps be more user-friendly?


  • Registered Users Posts: 8,219 ✭✭✭Calina


    I would favour R as well but it really only fulfills the "free" remit, rather than the "software" remit. It's a programming environment more than user software.

    A lot depends on what you want to do. If you're happy to head in the direction of programming, I think the latest version of Python has, or the next version of Python will have some sort of stats module and failing that, you can always look at using SciPy and NumPy. I think Java has some stats libraries as well but I'll drive a long way to avoid using Java so...

    If you're focussing on visualisation, arguably, Tableau has a public version but it's web based, and again, on the programming side, D3.js may be an option.

    It might also be worth looking at the free edition of Rapidminer although frankly if your dataset is anyway substantial at all, the RAM limit gets annoying very fast. It's more datamining than straight statistical analysis but again, depends on what exactly your user might want to do.

    PS: might be worth asking in the BigData/Data Analytics forum as well.


  • Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators Posts: 4,665 Mod ✭✭✭✭Tree


    I do most of my R work in Rstudio, so you might find that takes a bit of the edge off R. There's menus and the like for importing your data.


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  • Registered Users Posts: 2,551 ✭✭✭Squeeonline


    has anyone any experience with Sofa Stats? http://www.sofastatistics.com/home.php

    It looks quite friendly.


  • Registered Users Posts: 1,624 ✭✭✭wench


    For those who like SPSS, there is a free replacement which may be suitable, called PSPP
    http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/


  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,212 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    wench wrote: »
    For those who like SPSS, there is a free replacement which may be suitable, called PSPP
    http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/
    Have you, or anyone you know, used PSPP? User comments?


  • Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators Posts: 4,665 Mod ✭✭✭✭Tree


    I've used PSPP, I struggled with it as I had never used SPSS either, but the stats guy was able to take to it like a duck to water. I've since learned more about data analysis and like the graphics you get out of R/ggplot2


  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,212 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    Has anyone used SurveyMonkey freeware for data collection, and if so, what statistical freeware did you use to analyze the results? Were they user-friendly, or not? Comments please.


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,947 ✭✭✭dixiefly




  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,212 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    dixiefly wrote: »

    Free SAS? Will investigate this when time permits. Thanks.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 2,980 ✭✭✭Kevster


    Regarding R, I'm neither its biggest fan but it's free and you can save your scripts once you have developed them, i.e., for later re-use.

    For example, I have a large set of code that I can re-ruse to do factor analysis using K-means and the Gap statistic. I also have code that generates heatmaps and dendrograms, performs microarray analyses (incl. generation of QC images like MA plots and chip images), et cetera.

    I am of course happy to share with anyone.


  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,212 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    Thanks Kevster. R seems to be one of the most used stat freeware reported. Just wondering if there is something out there more user-friendly not mentioned yet?


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 31,967 ✭✭✭✭Sarky


    Tree wrote: »
    I do most of my R work in Rstudio, so you might find that takes a bit of the edge off R. There's menus and the like for importing your data.

    I tried that out recently myself, it really helps. Much easier to manage directories, plug-in packages, pictures and the like.


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  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,212 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    RStudio open source statistical freeware appears to meet most of the needs of my colleague with the budget constraints.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 84 ✭✭James esq


    If you want to be an enduser type researcher, survey monkey is a gift for sociology type research, you can get ten multi-questions out to a several hundred users for free and you can analyse up to 100 responses, and a full on survey for for a few euro a week.

    For those of us who think statistics is on the way out in certain areas replaced by analysis of large datasets, Rapidminer is yer man. One gig free, very intuitive and similar blackbox approach to GPSS, rated by Gartner, much less expensive than SAS, and doesn't have the steep learning curve R has.


  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,212 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    edX offers free online courses of instruction in statistics by several flagship universities. R statistics is a free downloaded programme that we have discussed here in this thread. There is a free introductory course starting 2 Feb 2016: "Foundations of Data Analysis - Part 1: Statistics Using R" offered by University of Texas at Austin that may be of interest.

    Link: https://www.edx.org/course/foundations-data-analysis-part-1-utaustinx-ut-7-10x


  • Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 9,639 Mod ✭✭✭✭Manach


    I am still a fan of R. Another tool I also would recommend is Elasticsearch/Kibana. It is both a DB and a means to create good user reports from the data. As well, it scales well with large volumes of data. However there is a bit a steep learning curve.


  • Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators Posts: 2,881 Mod ✭✭✭✭Kurtosis


    Black Swan wrote: »
    edX offers free online courses of instruction in statistics by several flagship universities. R statistics is a free downloaded programme that we have discussed here in this thread. There is a free introductory course starting 2 Feb 2016: "Foundations of Data Analysis - Part 1: Statistics Using R" offered by University of Texas at Austin that may be of interest.

    Link: https://www.edx.org/course/foundations-data-analysis-part-1-utaustinx-ut-7-10x

    Thanks for the heads up, I use Stata and SAS (plus a little experience with SPSS) but would be interested in trying out R as I have heard a lot of good things. This looks ideal to gain some familiarity with R to compare with the paid alternatives.


  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,212 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    Latest updates on various versions of free R Statistical software for UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS by the R Project.


  • Registered Users Posts: 1,027 ✭✭✭tphase


    some time ago I had need of something lightweight and scriptable to produce simple statistics on a realtime data stream and came across statist. It's command line only, small (executable is ~174kb) and runs well on low-end hardware which suited my needs for that project.


  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,212 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    Free self-paced course "Explore Statistics with R" offered by edX with examples from the health sciences.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,522 ✭✭✭paleoperson


    I don't get R Studio. I don't have a problem importing data with the command line or clipboard and it's only something you have to do once anyway per project. When I first heard about this software I thought great and hoped for Excel-like functions like data cells editable in real time or quick plots you can build. I prefer the original R look so I went back to that.


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  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,212 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    I prefer the original R look so I went back to that.
    Thanks for this observation paleoperson.


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