Hello We are a team working on a prospective psychological study. The study design is based on assessing data of three generations of humans over a long time period, wherein epidemiological as well as biological data will be assessed. Sample sizes will range from about 100 to several thousand depending on the research question. Currently we are looking for an apropriate statistical package. Here are some features that the software should have: - strong in the analysis of epidemiological and longitudinal data - platform independent (should run under different operating systems like Windows, Mac OS, Unix) - Ease of use for non-statistic-professionals (i.e. userfriendly GUI) - High acceptance by scientific journals, by the FDA - Importance relative to other packages with respect to the number of users, the number of publications in which the software is used, the market share etc. (including the recent development of these indices!) As we had some problems in finding information concerning these items we would like to ask you where we might find it (if at all) and why R is presumably the best competitor and why? Thanks in advance for any suggestions concerning this! -- Dr. Andrea Hans Meyer University of Basel Institute of Psychology Missionsstrasse 60/62 CH-4055 Basel Switzerland Phone: ++41 61 267 06 55 Fax: ++41 61 267 06 59
Spencer Graves
2006-Jul-10 02:03 UTC
[R] R vs. other software? (was: Software for Epidmiological, Longitudinal Data)
There have been numerous discussions on this listserve of the comparative advantages of R vs. SAS, for example, and various benchmark studies have been published. If you haven't already tried Google, I encourage you to do so. PRIMARY STRENGTHS OF R From my perspective, R is the platform of choice for new statistical algorithm development for a rapidly increasing number of people. The open source nature of R provides huge advantages for learning and for new algorithm development. If I don't understand something, I can walk through the code line by line until I figure it out. That's especially easy with the 'debug' facility in R. Similarly, the ease with which I can experiment with a modification of an existing algorithm depends on the availability of source code for something similar. With commercial software, that obstacle is often insurmountable. With open source, this kind of experimentation is trivial for anyone who is not intimidated by command-driven software. MARKET SHARE The popularity of R can be judged in part from the fact that it is available from 58 mirrors in in 24 countries; those were the numbers I got when I counted a couple of months ago. At that time, the mirror I checked offered free instant access to 724 contributed packages beyond the base distribution, and this does not include much of the 'Bioconductor', which specializes in microarray data. There are occasional difference between mirrors, but those are temporary. At one time, the market dominance of both SAS and IBM was sustained by the perception that 'nobody ever got fired' for using them. Those days are history now for SAS as well as IBM, even with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where for many years, SAS was the de facto standard in many pharmaceutical companies for their applications for regulatory approval. I have no data on the use of R in articles submitted to refereed journals, but I'm confident it is growing. Increasingly, when I consider reading an article or buying a book, I look for the availability of a companion R package, because it can make a huge difference in how easily and thoroughly I can absorb the material. SOFTWARE QUALITY The core R distribution seems to be as solid as anything on the market today. Contributed packages run from rock solid to highly buggy. GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE R does not ship with a GUI, but several are available; see "www.sciviews.org/_rgui". I use XEmacs (ESS), mentioned on that web site, but it's primary a command line editor. More GUI-type features are available from other open source software such as SciViews and JGR. TECHNICAL SUPPORT The level of support available from this listserve beats the level of technical support I've ever gotten for any commercial software. Some people's questions never get answered, but that's true with technical support anywhere. Other questions generate a feeding frenzy of replies. This listserve has a posting guide (www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html); I believe that posts that more closely match those guidelines are more likely to be greeted with multiple replies than silence. R-help is on-line, 24-7. If you really want an answer and don't get one in 24 hours, review the posting guide, and think about how you can make your question more clear, perhaps with a different subject line and / or a simple (or simpler) self-contained example. The "R Site Search" is also great, and now there's an R Wiki. For two other previous comments related to this, see the following: http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/Rhelp02a/archive/51244.html https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-finance/2004q4/000250.html Hope this helps. Spencer Graves Andrea Meyer wrote:> Hello > > We are a team working on a prospective psychological study. The study > design is based on assessing data of three generations of humans over a > long time period, wherein epidemiological as well as biological data > will be assessed. Sample sizes will range from about 100 to several > thousand depending on the research question. > > Currently we are looking for an apropriate statistical package. Here are > some features that the software should have: > - strong in the analysis of epidemiological and longitudinal data > - platform independent (should run under different operating systems > like Windows, Mac OS, Unix) > - Ease of use for non-statistic-professionals (i.e. userfriendly GUI) > - High acceptance by scientific journals, by the FDA > - Importance relative to other packages with respect to the number of > users, the number of publications in which the software is used, the > market share etc. (including the recent development of these indices!) > > As we had some problems in finding information concerning these items we > would like to ask you where we might find it (if at all) and why R is > presumably the best competitor and why? > > Thanks in advance for any suggestions concerning this! >