RE: Other Free SPSS Alternatives

[Muenchen, Robert A (Bob)]

Hi ftr,

Very interesting! I've never heard of ViSta or Tanagra, but I'll definitely 
take a look at them. As you can see from my regularly-updated web page, I'm 
just slightly obsessed with data science software: 
http://r4stats.com/articles/popularity/.

In the open-source data mining realm, KNIME has much to recommend it. It hooks 
into many other open source tools. However, it's particularly weak in 
statistical analysis. I sent them a list of over 40 tests it lacks & those are 
on their future roadmap, but at the rate they're going, it'll take years to 
catch up with SPSS.

I completely agree with you on the importance of output management. That's one 
of the topics that clearly separates BlueSky from jamovi. BlueSky uses R's 
"Tidyverse" and "broom" functions to do things like perform regression by a 
categorical variable, then output 3 different data sets, one at the model level 
(e.g. r**2) one at the parameter level (betas, p-values, etc) and one at the 
observation level (predicted value, measures of influence, etc.)   All its 
modeling methods, statistical and machine learning, can be used to make 
predictions on the same or new data sets. 

It has been a while since I tried Mondrian. As I recall, it did a beautiful job 
on categorical visualization, but little else way back when I tried it last. 
I'll take another look.

SPSS & SAS offer modern methods for imputing missing values, but when it comes 
to point-and-click competition, support is weak across the board. I pointed 
this out to the BlueSky developers & they say they'll add support for R's 
Simputation package in their January release: 
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/simputation/vignettes/intro.html .  
Simputation acts as front-end to many other R packages, so that should provide 
a wide range of options.

I have to confess that I didn't look into categorical methods very thoroughly. 
I'll see if I can't add that to my review template (missing value too).

Cheers,
Bob

-----Original Message-----
From: ftr <address@hidden> 
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2018 9:50 AM
To: Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) <address@hidden>; address@hidden
Subject: Re: Other Free SPSS Alternatives

Hi Bob,

I really appreciate your work as I am not a programmer but a social scientist 
that uses stats to answer substantial questions. And I was just "surprised" 
when I asked a newbie question in the R forum some years ago. So SPSS for SPPS' 
sake, R for R's sake, is not my job. 
Therefore I bought your book, too.

There are two other free programs that merit attention:
ViSta : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViSta,_The_Visual_Statistics_system
Mondrian: http://www.theusrus.de/Mondrian/ Mondrian is a R GUI.

Tanagra: http://eric.univ-lyon2.fr/~ricco/tanagra/en/tanagra.html
TANAGRA is a free DATA MINING software for academic and research purposes. It 
proposes several data mining methods from exploratory data analysis, 
statistical learning, machine learning and databases area.
The advantage of Tanagra ist that its programmer as a data mining teacher and 
as such he published a manuals for a large number of his sub-programmes.

As for commercial side I don't see anything on the horizon for Jasp and jamovi 
as they are both academic programmes.

Both have a real drawback: You can't create new variables from the results of 
the procedures. So you get rapid and good looking results from a PCA, for 
instance, but you can't save the dimensions. I asked for this but it does not 
seem on their radar. This makes these programmes less useful as it breaks the 
analysis and production process. They solved the first problem of an analysis 
cycle, data input , but not the last one, data output.

BTW, two other issues I would treat in a programme review is:
how easily treated are missing values ?
Missing values are a standard problem in real life, and already input with MV 
varies from programme to programme. Does the programme do more than list-wise 
or case-wise deletion, or does it already stall when missing values appear ?

Is the program useful for categorical data analysis ? Very often the 
statistical programmes are oriented towards the analysis of continuous data (in 
biomedical, physics, engineering, ...) , but in social, political or management 
sciences or in any survey analysis this is not at the centre. For instance, 
multiple correspondence analysis is quite seldom.

Regards,

ftr

On 29/11/2018 14:25, Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) wrote:
> Hi ftr,
> 
> I'm aware of Jasp, but haven't decided if I'll review it yet. I still haven't 
> gotten the jamovi review into the extensive review format that I used to 
> standardize the other reviews. I hope to do that over the Christmas break.  
> I'd also like to look at R AnalyticFlow, which is more like SPSS Modeler than 
> SPSS Statistics: https://r.analyticflow.com/en/. That workflow interface has 
> much to recommend it, though reporting seems to be a weak point. I love the 
> APA-style tables in jamovi and BlueSky!
> 
> Jamovi was started by former Jasp developers. There's a very interesting 
> interview with Jonathan Love about those two packages here: 
> http://blog.efpsa.org/2017/03/23/introducing-jamovi-free-and-open-statistical-software-combining-ease-of-use-with-the-power-of-r/
>  .
> 
> I'm using the open source version of BlueSky, but I'll be surprised if there 
> aren't commercial angles to several of the others for people who want to be 
> able to pay for tech support.
> 
> With so many wonderful options, it's a great time to be using statistics &/or 
> machine learning. I think IBM/SPSS, SAS Institute, and Statacorp must be 
> quaking in their boots!
> 
> Cheer,
> Bob
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pspp-users <address@hidden> On 
> Behalf Of ftr
> Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2018 6:23 PM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: Other Free SPSS Alternatives
> 
> Hi Bob,
> Did you wrote about Jasp ?
> 
> Blue Sky Stats has an open source and a commercial version.
> 
> Regards,
> -ftr
> 
> On 28/11/2018 15:13, Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I've been looking into open-source SPSS alternatives and have written 
>> a set of reviews on them here:
>>
>> http://r4stats.com/articles/software-reviews/
>>
>> Several of them are adding features at a fast rate, so this should be 
>> very interesting area to watch.
>>
>> The one that has the most features at the moment is BlueSky Statistics:
>>
>> http://r4stats.com/2018/10/01/bluesky-statistics-6-04-gui-for-r-updat
>> e
>> /
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Bob
>>
>> cid:image001.png@01D3700F.CFBC4980
>>
>> *Bob Muenchen*
>> Manager, Research Computing Support
>>
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