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Re: st: Top 10 Tricks in Stata (summary to date)


From   Richard Williams <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: Top 10 Tricks in Stata (summary to date)
Date   Sun, 23 May 2004 13:56:30 -0500

At 06:32 PM 5/23/2004 +0100, Nick Cox wrote:
On Friday 21 May 2004 I asked

Which would we nominate as (say) the top ten tricks which are the
deepest and most Stataish features in what we use? What is _both_
simple _and_ deep?  What leads to great results with at most a few
lines of code?
I'm most attracted to things Stata can do that SPSS either can't do or that are much more difficult to do in SPSS. So, I'll add to the list

* Robust standard errors (actually, these can be done in SPSS; I saw a web page that takes 10 pages to print showing how to do it. I think just adding , robust to a command is easier).

* Robust regression routines, e.g. rreg and qreg. There is no SPSS counterpart that I know of.

* More generally, Stata's internal consistency is vastly superior to SPSS's. SPSS probably has 50 different routines, which look like they were written by 50 different people who all had their own ideas about what the best possible syntax would be. With Stata, you can guess what the syntax of an estimation command will be and you'll probably be right or at least very close. (But in fairness I'll add that several of my students say they prefer SPSS because they think its pulldown menu system is superior.)


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Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
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