Quant Forums?

July 20, 2009 4:08 PM

Popular Forums on Statistics and Quantitative Research?

In undergrad I got interested in web development, but I did not know anything. I learned web development by hanging around forums such as WebmasterWorld. I asked and answered hundreds of questions over two or three years and now am actually pretty good at it.

I want to apply the same method to learning (more) quantitative research. What are the most popular internet forums out there on statistics and quantitative research?

posted by Spurious to Work & Money (7 answers total)

That's... wow. That's tough. I read about stats stuff every day, and I don't know of a decent forum.

But, there are places other than forums to soak up knowledge (though you might not get the Q&A you're used to).

Andrew Gelman's blog

I haven't read in months, but fivethirtyeight used to have good commentary about its methods.

I learn a lot just from programming with R, and for me, the beating heart of the R world is the Revolution blog. You might also try searching search.twitter.com for the hashtag "#rstats". Much of it will be about programming R, but you'll also see people asking about how to do this type of analysis on this kind of data, etc., and that will help give you some context.

Gabriel Rossman blogs mostly about Stata, but you can pick up a lot from that, too.

Anyway, that's about all I've got. Good luck. I will definitely be keeping an eye on this thread.
posted by McBearclaw at 6:08 PM on July 20, 2009

The Statalist often has some helpful stuff, though it's mostly about Stata. Also, you might try the polmeth list -- political science based, but also quantitative methodology based. These are both listservs, and not forums, though.
posted by proj at 6:12 PM on July 20, 2009

It looks like there is definitely demand (with 5 favorites) yet no supply of such a forum. At some level, it is the opportunity cost of time I guess. Also, (well I might be wrong but), I've never seen a purely academic forum in my life. Not a blog or a forum but, I'd recommend "Mostly Harmless Econometrics", and any econometrics /statistics book to get things going.
posted by caelumluna at 6:15 PM on July 20, 2009

Response by poster: Yeah, I actually do statistical work, so I do not need an introduction. It is just that I learned so much hanging out on WebmasterWorld that I figured there had to be a hugely popular forum on statistics.
posted by Spurious at 6:21 PM on July 20, 2009

Say what you will about Livejournal, but there are two stats-related communities over there: stat_geeks and statisticians. Both deal with applied stats and methodology, but they're both rather low-volume, unfortunately.
posted by thisjax at 10:12 PM on July 20, 2009

Can you explain what aspects of statistics interest you, how you use statistics in your work, and perhaps what software are you interested in?
posted by gryftir at 2:44 PM on July 21, 2009

http://talkstats.com/ seems to get pretty decent activity (~6,000 members)

http://www.physicsforums.com/ is much, much larger (160,000+ members)

Here are the largest quant finance forums I found when I was researching that career recently:
http://www.wilmott.com/
http://www.quantnet.org/forum/
http://www.nuclearphynance.com/default.aspx

Newsgroups used to be good but I just looked through Google Groups and the most useful related ones seem to be only
R-help-archive
comp.soft-sys.matlab
(sci.math and sci.stat don't get much traffic)
posted by renovatio1 at 8:45 PM on July 21, 2009