Solved – What programming language for statistical inference

javaMATLABpythonr

just for curiosity…
What language is used most here?
R? MATLAB? Python? Java?

What for prototype or for production?
For example I think MATLAB is mostly used for prototyping, python for both prot. and production…

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I couldnt agree more with a vote for R. R is the "Lingua Franca" of the statistics world. It is the definition of cutting edge, while most packages for MATLAB and SAS take several months. The language is very simple to understand as opposed to SAS. It also gives you the power to connect with C/C++/Python and databases.

Consider Revolution Analytics version of R for a bit more performance.

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/products/revolution-r.php

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Solved – Among Matlab and Python, which language is good for statistical analysis

As a diehard Matlab user for the last 10+ years, I recommend you learn Python. Once you are sufficiently skilled in a language, when you work in a language you are learning, it will seem like you are not being productive enough, and you will fall back to using your default best language. At the very least, I would suggest you try to become equally proficient in a number of languages (I would suggest R as well).

What I like about Matlab:

I am proficient in it.
It is the lingua franca among numerical analysts.
the profiling tool is very good. This is the only reason I use Matlab instead of octave.
There is a freeware clone, octave, which has good compliance with the reference implementation.

What I do not like about Matlab:

There is not a good system to manage third party (free or otherwise) packages and scripts. Mathworks controls the 'central file exchange', and installation of add-on packages seems very clunky, nothing like the excellent system that R has. Furthermore, Mathworks has no incentive to improve this situation, because they make money on selling toolboxes, which compete with freeware packages;
Licenses for parallel computation in Matlab are insanely expensive;
Much of the m-code, including many of the toolbox functions, and some builtins, were designed to be obviously correct, at the expense of efficiency and/or usability. The most glaring example of this is Matlab's median function, which performs a sort of the data, then takes the middle value. This has been the wrong algorithm since the 70's.
saving graphs to file is dodgy at best in Matlab.
I have not found my user experience to have improved over the last 5 years (when I started using Matlab instead of octave), even though Mathworks continues to add bells and whistles. This indicates that I am not their target customer, rather they are looking to expand market share by making things worse for power users.
There are now 2 ways to do object-oriented programming in Matlab, which is confusing at best. Legacy code using the old style will persist for some time.
The Matlab UI is written in Java, which has unpleasant ideas about memory management.

Solved – What languages are commonly used in medical statistics

This question seems to me to conflate two issues: Programming and statistics.

I don't know what programming languages are used in medical labs, although I get the sense that none are. In terms of statistics, I'd say R and SAS dominate. These are radically different languages. The problem with trying to teach SAS is 1) Since it isn't on your list you probably don't know it and 2) You'd have to have access to it, and it's expensive. That would lead to teaching R. But if they wind up in a place that uses SAS exclusively, I don't think R would help much.

However, if the person will be doing their own analysis, then R is fine. I would try to teach reproducible research methods.

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Solved – Among Matlab and Python, which language is good for statistical analysis

Solved – What languages are commonly used in medical statistics

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