SPSS alternative for Tiger?
August 9, 2005 3:11 PM   Subscribe

Can anyone recommend some statistical analysis software for OS X 10.4?

I've used SPSS in the past but it doesn't work with Tiger at the moment. A patch has been promised but they keep pushing back the release date for it. Argh!

Bonus points if you can point me towards a decent package that has a free trial and/or a decently priced student license. My university pays for a sitewide SPSS license so I haven't had to buy anything myself up to now.
posted by sanitycheck to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)
 
You could use R, which is free. The online docs suck though; with the money you would have spent on a license, get a book instead.
posted by grouse at 3:20 PM on August 9, 2005


Best answer: I recently ran across this page with a list of statistics software packages for OS X.

They recently added a note about how to run SPSS on Tiger, which I haven't tried.
posted by istewart at 4:07 PM on August 9, 2005


R is good and free, but the object orientation can take some getting used to, and not in unamiguously good ways. It gets annoying having to poke your regression output to reveal itself to you. Can't beat the price, or the support, or the power. If you can do it, you can do it in R.

Stata licenses can be reasonably priced depending on your school. One-year licenses for Small Stata, which should run most student-sized datasets, run as low as $50, and perpetual licenses for "normal" Intercooled Stata run like $150. Your school might well have a site license for it.

In your boots, I'd also see what software is available on your university's unix boxen and think about using that software remotely.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 4:24 PM on August 9, 2005


Student licenses of JMP IN are inexpensive (~$65). A much easier alternative to R.
posted by Rothko at 4:31 PM on August 9, 2005


If you're interested in learning some more advanced tools, there's Scientific Python, or Mathematica. Both of these have a steeper learning curve than R, but will allow you to do just about anything with your data.
posted by Popular Ethics at 4:57 PM on August 9, 2005


I should have added that SciPy is open-source, and Mathematica has a demo.
posted by Popular Ethics at 5:01 PM on August 9, 2005


Igor. It's cross-platform (Windows and Mac OS X), works both through a graphical interface and a scripting language (all features are available through both), interfaces with National Instruments data acquisition products, has a programming interface for user extensions written in C. If I didn't already know and love MATLAB so much, I'd use it all the time.
posted by fatllama at 12:11 AM on August 10, 2005


Stata is very good. And they say Mac OS X compatible. A new version just came out as well. Very extensible and geek friendly and large user community. Student rates are also available. Stata is the statistical tool of choice in economics and sociology.
posted by eaglemoon at 1:10 PM on August 11, 2005


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