Internet Support for Statistics Software

Question

A discussion last fall considered the extent to which purely software-related questions would be welcome on this site. It didn't really reach a conclusion, but one useful suggestion that arose is to collect a set of links to online support resources (such as user groups and list servers) for the various statistical computing platforms. I guess that would let us close some of these questions in a constructive and relatively guilt-free manner. I, for one, would like to help the people who come by with questions about SAS macro syntax or table access, even though these questions have no direct statistical interest (and would interest only small subcommunities here) and therefore ought to be closed or migrated.

Could we organize replies in the present thread by software platform? The ones of most immediate use are those that keep showing up: R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, Excel.

Answer 1

R

R-help, and the various R Mailing Lists or SIGs, welcome any questions (provided they conform to the Posting Guide). Answers generally come within one or two days.

Quick-R gives a gentle overview of most of the basic R syntax for people coming from SAS, SPSS, or Stata. Stack Overflow also provides strong support for R questions. Additionally, rseek.org provides a custom Google search that facilitates queries related to R code, packages, articles, etc., while crantastic.org features useful reviews of current packages.

If you're looking for visualization ideas, visit the R Graph gallery and the Learn R blog, both of which feature a wide variety of plots and the accompanying code.

To add the excellent resources list above, I (@michelle) have found the R Tutorial web site to be helpful. Also I have R bloggers as a feed. That has lots of useful posts from various bloggers and is an excellent way to keep up with new packages and new ways of using existing packages. If you're coming from SAS or SPSS, check out R for SAS and SPSS Users; there is a book with more information in it. An equivalent book for Stata users coming to R is R for Stata Users.

Answer 2

STATA

StataList is the place to go with questions about how to do things in any version of Stata. It is active and experts usually answer within hours.

The official FAQ's are extremely useful as well.

ATS/UCLA has an entire section dedicated to Stata. Start from there with the learning modules, the FAQ's or the "links by topic".

Answer 3

SAS

SAS questions do get asked and answered on StackOverflow, as well as RunSubmit (a Stack-alike site specifically for SAS).

The proceedings of SUGI are a tremendous resource. Also invaluable if you need material for a corny SAS stand-up comedy routine.

The UCLA Academic Technology Services provide really fantastic resources for SAS.

Chris Hemedinger on his blog, The SAS Dummy, has posted a listing of various SAS blogs he follows (including his own) in two google reader bundles (currently 60 blogs in total!). Even if you don't use google reader it is possible to follow the trail to the various webpages.

Another resource is SAS-L (site has archives and information on how to join).

The online documentation at the SAS support page is a great resource. It includes the SAS User's Guide which contains quite detailed information on SAS procedures, including syntax, theoretical details, and examples. As an example, here's the page for proc glm.

Answer 4

RAPIDMINER

• The one forum (rapid-i developers participate, too)
• User Manual for RM 5.x
• Developer Manual / White Paper for RM 5.x (for a fee): how to customize the software.

Answer 5

SPSS

Several forums devoted to SPSS software usage are;

• University of Georgia SPSSX discussion list
• SPSS google group forum
• SPSS developer central

SPSSX and the google group forum receive a fairly wide variety of data manipulation questions and questions related to statistical analysis. Developer central is sometimes a more appropriate place to go if you are doing anything not related to actions that can be accomplished through traditional syntax or the GUI (e.g. scripting in python or vba).

Make sure to check out the SPSS tag wiki for a more complete list of resources, many of which are freely accessible online.

Answer 6

Python

Although this is not a statistical package per se, it has extensive statistical capabilities.

• The Python Wiki is a gateway to Python.

• http://www.python-forum.org/pythonforum is a Python-oriented Q&A site.

• StatPy ("special emphasis on astrostatistics").

• Links to Numeric and scientific packages.

• Scikit-learn for machine learning.

• statsmodels, for common statistical models.

• pandas, for enhanced data structures, including time-series.

Answer 7

Taverna Workbench

It is a open source tool that has been more used for helping in data mining recently. In other words, you can create pieces of the workflow to code extracting data from different databases, analyze them, do some processing and it also supports output in R.

"Taverna is an open source and domain-independent Workflow Management System – a suite of tools used to design and execute scientific workflows and aid in silica experimentation".

• Taverna Website
• my Experiment - Social networking and workflow sharing environment for scientists
• Curated catalogue of Web services for Life Sciences
• Mailing List