Stat Programs

[strech4]

Hi guys I've been studying basketball for a while now, and am looking now to get into the analytics side. What programs are commonly used in the field to do these types of statistcal analyses? SAS? R? Just curious because I would like to start practicing working with data sets myself.

[J.E.]

I think most people use R. I use Python with SciPy, NumPy and scikit-learn

[mystic]

I use R, Matlab (Octave) and F95. Sometimes, for quick and dirty stuff, I use Excel+SPSS. For retrieving data, Python (with BeautifulSoup package) works best for me.

Though, I used SAS/JMP for other stuff ... if you are familar with it, that should work as well for basketball data analysis.

[strech4]

Cool, thanks for the advice.

[mtamada]

Does nobody use Stata? Hard-core statisticians tend to use R; hard-core econometricians and polimetricians, and I think increasingly other quant-oriented social scientists, have been moving more and more to Stata. Cheaper yet able to do advanced stats as well as the big commercial stats programs can. Easier to learn and use than R. It won't process huge data files the way that SAS can, but it's designed for analysis not industrial scale data management. Highly programmable and thus like R has a huge user community wherein people write and share snippets of code and entire programs with each other.

[strech4]

I have used stata before and have found it quite user friendly and efficient in completing statistical analyses.

[mystic]

I haven't seen Stata before, but just took a look at it. Seems like a mixture between SPSS, Mathematica and GnuPlot based on what you can do with it... That should work too. I suggest use the program which makes it easy for you to make some analyses first. If you want to do stuff which can't be done with it, try out R ...