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Visually exploring and representing survey data.

proj — Wed, 07 May 2008 09:45:08 -0800

Best ways to visually explore a large survey data set? My advisor has advised me to explore my data set visually before diving in statistically. It is a large (N = 180,000+) survey data set comprised of individuals in over 80 countries. Most of the responses are categorical or dichotomous in nature, taking the form "agree/disagree" or "yes/no/maybe." Some of them are Likert-style scales (1-5, Disagree-Agree). Many of the demographic variables are also categorical (for example, rather than asking income, "income level" is asked) but I do have a few continuous variables such as age. My dependent variable of interest is a scale composed of four survey items indexed to 100 (although the actual number of discrete values taken on the scale is rather low owing to the nature of the questions comprising the scale).

What would be some interesting ways to visually explore this data? Obviously, scatterplots (even with jittering) are not the way to go because of the highly redundant and categorical nature of the data. I have a few boxplots that I've generated (usually separating by gender or region). I am open to abstract suggestions or concrete suggestions using R or Stata.

Recommended Stata alternatives?

matthewr — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 04:46:37 -0800

What is the best free substitute for Stata? I use Stata at university, but only have access to it during term-time. During vacation, I'd like a free program that can open large Stata (or SPSS or SAS) datasets, manipulate the data (pooling datasets, generating variables etc), and run regressions. I don't expect to use any particularly complex statistical methods. Ease of use is a priority: I have only a few weeks and a fair amount of work to do, so although I could probably get by with a command-line, a GUI solution would be great. Graphs would be nice, but are not essential. Windows support would be ideal, but Linux-only is acceptable.

I can use Google, so I'm not just looking for a list of open source statistical software; rather, I'd like recommendations of good Stata subsitutes. Thanks!

Windows memory usage

matthewr — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 08:22:00 -0800

How can I force Windows to allow an application (Stata) to allocate itself more memory, when I have plenty of unused physical memory? I recently upgraded to 2Gb of physical memory, and I'd like Stata to be able to use as much of this as possible so that I can work on large data files. The memory allocated for data is set manually with a command in Stata (set mem), but Windows (XP Home Edition) will only provide a maximum of about 745Mb before Stata reports "op.sys. refuses to provide memory". I was able to use up to 450Mb when my machine had only 768Mb of physical memory, so surely I ought to be able to get far more than 745Mb out of 2Gb. I have no other applications running, and no memory-intensive processes, so ought to have plenty of physical memory free.