Hi,
Pls see below:
Nick said:
I find it difficult to follow Timothy's scenario of a small business
manager who wants "non-statistican friendly software" that offers him
[sic] (e.g.) a choice between a PCA and a rotated factor analysis. That
implies a knowledge of multivariate analysis that I didn't know was
typical of that market, but I may "misunderestimate" it, to quote a
recent President.
I reply:
Of course this manager does not need to understand PCA or factor analysis - and that's the point, but everyone can look at a graphical representation of clustering in data. If you can explore data graphically from various angles with a few clicks of a mouse, I think that's a very marketable function in a piece of software.
Nick said:
More crucially, perhaps, I can't accept Tim's gross contrast between
graphics in Stata and graphics in R. Stata graphics currently has one
very big limitation in my view -- no serious support for contour or
perspective view of three-dimensional data, i.e. surfaces z relative to
two other variables x and y. That aside, I believe that Stata and R are
broadly comparable in their degree of graphics programmability. They are
based on very different architectures, but only a few people need care
about that if the results are similar.
I reply:
I had a hunch that Stata graphics is programmable. However, as Sergiy pointed out, the language is undocumented. As there is I believe no course on offer in Stata on graphics programming either, I don't really know where one can start.
Another point is that the graphical language in Stata is again different from Stata script language. So altogether, if you want to master Stata, you need to master 3 languages. Expertise in usual programming in R, however, would help you a long way in programming for R graphics.
Finally, although you may have already seen this, check out: http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/
It may be that all these can be reproduced in Stata, but my feeling is that the code would be more complicated, but I would gladly be proved wrong!
Tim
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