Hey, #databs, when you were in college/uni, did your stats professors teach using a programming language? Python, SAS, R?
For me, stats I-III were all on paper or in Excel, and I didn't learn stats w/ programming until junior and senior year. And when you did learn, what platform/IDE did you use?
For me, stats I-III were all on paper or in Excel, and I didn't learn stats w/ programming until junior and senior year. And when you did learn, what platform/IDE did you use?
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Undergrad research methods course: SPSS
Grad school research methods courses: Stata and R
MBA, 1998: excel
MSBA, 2019: R, SAS
i was sooo proud to have calculated a three-way anova in excel for that stupid class.
- As student: hand calculations & #SPSS
- As TA: hand calculations & #Excel for 1 class, #SPSS and random online site i forgot already for another class
PhD: #stata, #Mplus, & #rstats
Econometrics classes: Stata and Eviews. Had a random class in grad school that used minitab (which is *not* good software). Learned spss in my first internship.
I've been ride or die for R now for 10 years, though.
Minitab has good "basic stats" doc files, but *nothing else* to recommend it. I've always been under the impression that engineers used to use it, but that might be wrong.
Our use of it made no sense!
I had a forecasting class that used SAS, but that Prof retired end of semester, and I believe it was swapped for Eviews the next year.
Haven't checked, but I hope they've converged on either R (preferably), Python, or Stata. I should look into that!
The default language for that SAS copy was Chinese, but this was in Taiwan, so if anything that makes it more likely that it was just out of date instead of bootleg.
In graduate economics we used a truly horrible thing called SHAZAM, then E-Views, then STATA.
Developing Statistical Software in Fortran 95
Authors: David R. Lemmon , Joseph L. Schafer
In grad school, it was assumed we would know S-plus for our homework. Not sure why?? So I had to become a self-taught programmer of sorts.
Lots of scaffolding, lots of hands on practice in real time, lots of answering questions from the learners, asking one of the learners to demo on their own computer how they write code.
do NOT traumatize the students for the rest of their lives; leave them excited to learn more after the course
😁
Then he was like, “Idk R too much—you’ll need to figure it out if you don’t want to do SAS—“
Me: Say no more fam. [I mainly teach myself R]
Both depts were part of the engineering school, totally separate from the theoretical math dept. I think a MATLAB intro course may have been required by both?
But point and click .. hooo boy that’s a different story
But nowadays it's all #Rstats in RStudio.
E.g.
https://easystats.github.io/parameters/
https://easystats.github.io/parameters/articles/model_parameters_print.html
Or the many table creating packages, like https://modelsummary.com/ or https://www.danieldsjoberg.com/gtsummary/, if the customization options in {parameters} are not sufficient.
Master's (biostats): #Stata 🤷
PhD: #rstats 😍😍😍
R was optional in the master's, I made it mandatory for my PhD :)
So in that case I initially learned from my professor teaching computation physics in Mathematica (alternative MatLab) & later was a little weird for moving towards Python when focusing on statistical mechanics++
But ended up towards more SWE-like languages & never renewed my initial license. It was C/C++ for simulations but my advisor really got me into Python for analysis (scipy + numpy)
Masters ~ excel, QBASIC
PhD ~ statistica, excel, QBASIC
Courses were taught without any tool, and then students collected their data and analyzed them. Being from a low economy, most students rely on free or expired software. Today, I encourage all my students to use #rstats.
Grad in stats: R/SAS First semester
Wouldn't be my first choice, (mainly bc I don't know c++ lol), but I think I'd still prefer that over excel 😅
Late undergrad, psych stats: JMP (and some by hand)
Ph.D.: SAS, SPSS, Mplus (and LISREL and BILOG for some niche courses)
Never learned stats in Excel. My Psych major required a programming course, which could be Excel, but I took a C course.
I also used Mathematica in a mathematical graphics undergrad course -- not a common use.
At one point, I was teaching a class where I taught them SAS, SPSS, R, and Mplus through the semester -- bad choice.
But I live in New Zealand.
Thought I absolutely hated statistical computing and only wanted to be a theory person until I found R