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Statistical software
One question we are often asked is "Which statistical package(s) do you recommend?". Below we give a brief description of the most popular packages within RCH, MCRI and the University of Melbourne. We are not able to provide much advice about other packages, with which we have little personal experience. We do not recommend that people perform statistical analyses with spreadsheet programs such as Excel (despite the increasingly powerful capabilities available there), mainly because of the difficulty of keeping track of exactly what you've done. Excel may be helpful for producing graphs, but again we would prefer to use a statistical package with graphical capabilities (see below) or a dedicated graphics package such as SigmaPlot.
To obtain information on University site licences, contact your affiliated university department.
Statistical packages used in CEB Unit
Stata
Stata (http://www.stata.com) is a powerful but simple 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.ﾠOne ofﾠits biggest features and a major reason for its growing popularity is that new capabilities can be written into the program quite easily by users. There is a large user group and a quarterly publication containing new commands that can be obtained via the Internet.
SAS
SAS is a large, general-purpose package descended from an original program that was designed to run on mainframe computers in a "batch" mode, ie. by the user submitting a batch of commands and then getting a pile of results in a separate output file (or window, now that Windows and Mac versions are available). Along with a slightly complicated approach to data management, this makes the program harder to learn than the interactive packagesﾠStata and Minitabﾠ- and compared with SPSS there is less capability to learn by experiment using menus. On the other hand, the data processing capabilities are extremely powerful and the range of statistical procedures wide. To obtain information on University site licences, contact your affiliated university department.
SPSS
SPSS is a well-known package particularly popular in the social sciences and psychology. It is a very large and somewhat cumbersome program but also very powerful and capable of performing almost all the standard methods of analysis. Recent Windows versions have a convenient user interface, but it can still be hard to keep track of exactly what you've done. The menu-based interface makes it relatively easy to learn, at least for simple applications. To obtain information on University site licences, contact your affiliated university department.
S-PLUS
S-PLUS is a program for specialist statisticians only. It is an interactive, object-oriented system, with both a wide range of built-in functions and complete programming capabilities for extending these. Probably its most useful feature for us is an extremely powerful and relatively easy-to-use capacity for graphics.
R
| R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is very similar to S-PLUS and is absolutely free. However, as R is a non-commercial package, documentation for specific tasks can be difficult to obtain. We generally use R to produce highly complex graphs |  |