- About CEBU
- Advice & Consultancy
- Teaching
- What's On
- Setting up a Clinical Trial
- Research
- Software
- Staff
- AMS students
- Contact us
Print version
STATA information
Why we recommend Stata
Stata (http://www.stata.com) is a powerful statistics package with an interactive style of operation based on commands that give immediate results. It has a wide range of capabilities, including good facilities for data manipulation, and advanced statistics such as survival analysis (including Kaplan-Meier curves) and logistic regression. It also has a number of useful commands for performing epidemiological analyses such as computing risk, rate and odds ratios with confidence intervals, and the ability to produce graphics of publication quality. The program is remarkably compact in terms of disk space and computationally efficient and is available in essentially identical form on both Windows PCs and Macs. One of its biggest features and a major reason for its growing popularity is that new capabilities can be written into the program by users. There is a large user group and a quarterly publication containing new commands that can be obtained via the Internet.
Release of Stata 10
The current release of Stata is version 10, released in 2007. New features in Stata 10 include a point-and-click graphics editor and enhancements to the user interface as well as a long list of new statistical capabilities including enhanced sample size calculators and multilevel mixed logistic and Poisson regression. Stata 10 includes publication quality graphics, a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows data management and analysis to be done from pull-down menus and much more. For more detailed information on Stata 10, visit http://www.stata.com/stata10/.
What are Stata/IC (intercooled), Stata/SE and Small Stata?
Stata/IC is the full version of Stata. It can analyse data sets with as many as 2,047 variables and the only limit on observations is the amount of RAM on your computer. Stata/SE has the same features as Stata/IC, but can handle extremely large data sets (up to 32,767 variables). Small Stata also has the same features as Stata/IC, but is slower and can only analyse data sets with a maximum of 99 variables and about 1,000 observations (but is cheaper to purchase). For more detailed information, go to http://www.stata.com/info/windows.html
Courses in Stata
We offer two courses in Stata repeated several times throughout the year: Stata I and Stata II. Stata I focuses on preparing data for analysis, i.e. importing data into Stata, checking for data errors., basic methods for describing and summarising the data and simple graphical techniques. Stata II covers basic statistical analysis methods (focussing on comparison of two groups) and some more advanced data manipulation. Both Stata courses are taught using Stata 9. For timetable and registration information click here.
Obtaining a copy of Stata
If you are based at the RCH, you can order a copy of Stata on our network licence by contacting the CEBU Secretary on extension 6368. Otherwise, visit the web site of the local Stata distributor, Survey Design and Analysis Services (http://survey-design.com.au) for ordering information.
Stata Journal
The Stata Journal is a quarterly publication containing articles about statistics, data analysis, teaching methods and effective use of Stata's language. The Journal publishes reviewed papers together with shorter notes and comments, regular columns, book reviews and other material of interest to researchers applying statistics in a variety of disciplines. It also comes with user-written software additions to Stata which can be downloaded onto your hard drive from Stata's web site. Versions 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 of Stata are "web-aware" and all the user-written software can be installed via the internet, from within Stata. This feature is fully documented in the manuals.