by Robert A. Muenchen
Abstract: This page presents various ways of measuring the popularity or market share of BMDP, JMP, Minitab, R, R-PLUS, Revolution R Enterprise, S-PLUS, SAS, SPSS, Stata, Statistica, and Systat, as well as two implementations of the SAS Lanugage, Carolina and World Programming System (WPS). I update this paper several times a year at http://r4stats.com/articles/popularity to provide an ongoing view of the software. Recent updates include: Figure 11 of job advertisements by package (5/28/2013); Figures 7a and 7b with the complete 2012 data; the TIOBE and Transparency rankings; number of bloggers in Table 3; latest data added to Rexer Survey in Fig. 3 (5/12/2013); 2012 data to listserv plot, Fig. 1a; added a new plot of forum discussion as Fig. 1b (2/12/2013).
Introduction
When choosing an analytical tool to use, there are many factors to consider. Does it run natively on your computer? Does the software provide all the methods you use? If not, how extensible is it? Does that extensibility use its own language, or an external one (e.g. Python, R, SQL) that is commonly accessible from many packages? Does it fully support the style (programming vs. point-and-click) that you like? Are its visualization options (e.g. static vs. interactive) adequate for your problems? Does it provide output the form you prefer (e.g. cut & paste vs. LaTeX integration)? Does it handle large enough data sets? Do your colleagues use it so you can easily share data and programs? Can you afford it?
It can also be helpful to know the size of the software’s market share and whether it is growing or shrinking. Software that is popular and whose usage is growing probably meets the needs of many people well, however that certainly doesn’t mean it will meet yours. That said, let’s examine various ways to estimate popularity and/or market share.
Sales & Downloads
Sales figures reported by some commercial vendors include products that have little to do with analysis. Many vendors don’t release sales figures, or they release them in a form that combines many different products, making the examination of a particular product impossible. For open source software such as R (Ihaka and Gentleman 1996) you could count downloads, but one confused person can download many copies, inflating the total. Conversely, many people can use a single download on a server, deflating it.
Download counts for the R-based Bioconductor project are located at
http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/stats/
. Similar figures for downloads of Stata add-ons (not Stata itself) are available at
http://fmwww.bc.edu/fmrc/reports/Report.SSC.html
. A list of Stata repositories is available at
http://stata.com/links/resources2.html
. The many sources of downloads both in repositories and individuals’ web sites makes counting downloads a very difficult task.
Language Popularity Measures
The TIOBE Community Programming Index ranks the popularity of programming languages, but from a programming language perspective rather than as analytical software (
http://www.tiobe.com
). It extracts measurements from blogs, entries in Wikipedia, books on Amazon, and search engine results, and combines them into a single index. In January 2012, they ranked R in 24th place and SAS at 31st. However, by May, 2013, the two had reversed positions with SAS in 22nd place and R in 24th.
The only other language that focuses on data analysis that is ranked in the top 100 is S. In previous years SPSS ranked in the 50-100 group but by February of 2013 it had dropped out (and is still out in May 2013.)
The Transparent Language Popularity Index is very similar to the TIOBE Index with except that its ranking software, algorithm and data are published for all to see. In May, 2013, it ranks R in 14th place and SAS in 27th. Those positions have been stable for at least the prior 6 months. This index also ranks R as a scripting language, where it is in 6th place after tools like PHP, Python and Perl. SAS is also ranked 4th when viewed as a business application writing tool like COBOL or PL/SQL. While these two additional areas may seen irrelevant to data analysis, both areas come in handy in general programming and business applications respectively, and add to the overall popularity of R and SAS.
Langpop.com also ranks programming languages (
http://langpop.com/
) in a variety of interesting ways, but unfortunately their focus excludes statistical software.
Internet Discussion
There are some stable and objective measures regarding analytic software. Schwartz (2009) suggested estimating relative popularity by plotting the amount of email discussion devoted to each. The most widely used packages all have discussion lists, or “listservs” devoted to them. The less popular ones either do not have such discussions or, like the lists for Minitab or S-PLUS, may have only a dozen or so emails per year. Some software packages have multiple discussion lists. For example, there are 25 devoted to using R (
http://www.r-project.org/mail.html
). Topics range from general help to various focused areas such as graphics, mapping, ecology, epidemiology, etc. . A broader list, including a version of R-Help in Spanish, lists 48 discussions (
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo
).
Figure 1a shows the level of activity on only each main discussion listserv in a typical month (i.e. forums, news groups and Google groups are excluded). Each point represents the sum of the 12 monthly counts that occurred in that year. This plot contains data through the end of 2012. If you read this article in previous years, this plot used to display the mean number of emails per month rather than the sum. Therefore the scale of the y-axis is different but the relative locations of the points are virtually identical. I made this change to enable better a better comparison to discussion forums (e.g. Fig. 1b).
Figure 1a. Sum of monthly email traffic on each software’s main listserv discussion list.
We can see that discussion of R has grown the most rapidly and, for the past few years, R is the most discussed software by an almost two-to-one margin. In recent years, it is followed by Stata, SAS and SPSS, respectively.
Stata showed steady discussion growth until it passed SAS in 2010.
SAS saw rapid growth in its discussion until 2006 when it leveled off and then declined. That decline coincided with the strong growth of both R and Stata, offering competition to SAS.
SPSS held steady at a low rate across the time frame, which may be attributable to its great ease of use relative to the other packages. With both the interface and the documentation aimed at people who prefer GUIs over programming, there’s less need to ask how to do variations on an analysis. In fact, there’s less ability to do such variations. As a result, I doubt SPSS’ low showing in this graph is indicative of its popularity or market share.
It would be interesting to see what topics were most discussed on each list. The only such analysis of which I am aware was done by Arthur Tabachnek (2010) for the SAS list. The most popular topic in 2009 turned out to be…R! You can read his full analysis here under slides from the 2010 session.
From 2011 onward, R and Stata joined SAS in the decline in listserv discussion. Given the sharp increase in the popularity of business analytics, Big Data, and so on, it is unlikely that people are using or talking about these tools less. Instead, alternative forums of discussion have appeared. The site Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com) covers a wide range of programming and statistical topics, while its sister site, Cross Validated (http://stats.stackexchange.com/), focuses only on statistical analysis. A third site, Talk Stats (http://www.talkstats.com), also focuses on statistical analysis. At all three sites, users tag their topics making it particularly easy to focus searches. Figure 1b shows the software people are discussing there.
Figure 1b. Number of posts per software on each forum on 2/10/2013.
We can see that the discussion of R is dramatically higher than the other packages, which don’t differ very much among themselves. Much of this difference is due to the influence of Stack Overflow, reflecting the vastly greater popularity of R as a programming language. However, even removing that effect, it is easy to see that R still dominates the discussions on the more statistically-oriented forums. This data is cumulative, but we can get a yearly view of just two of the tags: R and SAS (Figure 1c).
Figure 1c. Number of R- or SAS-related posts to Stack Overflow by week.
We see that discussion of SAS and R were roughly comparable until mid-2009 when the discussion of R began its very rapid climb. The page that provides this data does not display data for SPSS or Stata. The amount of data may be too low; no message provides the reason (see http://hewgill.com/~greg/stackoverflow/stack_overflow/tags).
Other popular discussion forum sites are LinkedIn.com and Quora.com. Neither of these sites make it easy to count number of posts, but they do display the number of people who have joined discussion groups (Figure 1d).
Figure 1d. Number of people registered in the main discussion group for each software on 2/10/2013.
In Figure 1d we get a better view of corporate software use. I do not know the ratio of corporate to academic use of LinkedIn, but among the academics I do know (quite a few) they use it very little. In this world, SAS is the leader with R close behind. It’s interesting to see SPSS with a 50% lead over Stata; it was also slightly higher in Fig. 1b. Remember these are people who have joined a group, not necessary people who are talking as the previous two figures were. Still, group membership should be a reasonable proxy for popularity or market share.
Blogs
On Internet blogs, people write about software that interests them, showing how to solve problems and interpreting events in the field. The more popular a software package is, the more bloggers there are writing about it. Blog consolidators like Tal Galili’s R-Bloggers.com and PROC-X.com, as well as sasCommunity.org Planet and statsblogs.com combine various blogs into a single location. While any particular blogger may write only an article every week or so, by combining them, the consolidators essentially provide a daily newspaper on various packages. So far only R and SAS are popular enough to have consolidated versions of their blogs (see Table 1).
| Software |
Number of Blogs |
| R | 452 |
| SAS | 40 |
| Stata | 8 |
| Others | 0-3 |
Table 1. Number of blogs devoted to each software package on May 12, 2013.
R’s 452 blogs put it way out in front of the pack, with SAS coming in at second place with 40. Stata has 8, which are listed here. Each of the other packages have either none or just a few.
Kaggle.com is a web site that sponsors data analysis contests. People post data analysis problems there along the amount of money they are willing pay the person or team who solves their problem the best. As I write this section (1/2/2012) there are over 25,000 analysts working on over 72,000 problems. Figure 2 shows the software used by the data analysts working on the problems. R is in the lead by a wide margin. R’s dominance is even greater among the contest winners, over 50% of whom used R. A potential source of bias in these figures is that the licenses of most proprietary software prohibits its use for the benefit of outside organizations (universities can help federal grant-providing agencies such as NSF and NIH, but cannot even solve problems for government agencies in general or nonprofits). However, I manage the research software site licenses at the University of Tennessee, and I can attest to the fact that people are often unaware of this limitation.
Figure 2. Software used in data analysis competitions in 2011.
Surveys of Use
One way to estimate the relative popularity of data analysis software is though a survey. Rexer Analytics does a survey every other year asking about tools used for data mining. The difference between software for classical data analysis and data mining is more of a marketing concept than one based on differences in analytic capability. Figure 3 shows the results of just one “check all that apply” type question about the tools that respondents reported using in 2010 (the 2012 data are not yet available).
Figure 3. Rexer Analytics Survey 2010 results for data mining/analytic tools.
We see that R comes out on top with 47% of data miners using it. SAS and SPSS are tied for second place with 32%. The entire report contained over 40 questions on topics such as algorithms used, fields, challenges, data, impact of the economy on the field, and more. More comprehensive results are available here. It’s interesting to note that SPSS and SAS are used more often than their more expensive products aimed specifically at data mining, IBM SPSS Modeler and SAS Enterprise Miner.
The results of a similar survey done by the data mining web site KDnuggets in 2012 are shown in Figure 4. This one shows R in first place with 30.7% of users reporting having used it for a real project. Excel is almost as popular. It seems out of place among so many more capable packages, but Excel is a tool that almost everyone has and knows how to use.
It’s interesting to note that four of the top five packages used were open source. While open source packages are clearly playing a major role in analytics, people still reported using more commercial software (1086) than open source (927).
Figure 4. Percent of KDnuggets survey respondents that reported using software for analytics, data mining or big data project for 12 months prior to May 2012.
The KDnuggets site conducted similar poll, this time asking, “What programming languages you used for data mining / data analysis in the past 12 months?” R dominated this poll, as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Languages used in data mining or analysis.
Books
The number of books published on each software reflects their relative popularity. Amazon.com offers an advanced search method which works well for all the software except R. I configured it with the following parameters:
Title: SAS -excerpt -chapter -changes [using SAS as an example]
Subject: Computers & Internet
Condition: New
Format: All formats
Publication Date: After September, 2001 [i.e. 10 years before the search on 10/13/2011]
Since it’s difficult to determine how many books use a particular software in its examples, I searched for books that included the software in the title. SAS has many manuals for sale as individual chapters or excerpts. Luckily, they contain “chapter” or “excerpt” in their title so I excluded them using the minus sign, e.g. “-excerpt”. SAS also has short “changes and enhancements” booklets that the other packages release only in the form of flyers and/or web pages so I excluded “changes” as well.
SAS and SPSS both have many versions of the same book or manual still for sale. For example, Marija Norusis’ 3 books on SPSS appear 20 times for various versions of SPSS released in the last 10 years. The SAS and SPSS numbers are both somewhat inflated as a result. Limiting the search to books published in the last 10 years mitigated this problem somewhat, but the SAS and SPSS figures are probably both still somewhat exaggerated.
The count of R books came from http://www.r-project.org/doc/bib/R-books.html. This list does contain seven books on S that are older but still relevant. Version numbers do not appear in any book titles so R avoids the over-counting problem that plagued my count of SAS and SPSS manuals. The most surprising aspect of the result (Figure 6) was how extremely dominant the top few packages are and that three well known packages had no books at all written about them (BMDP, Statistica, Systat). Revolution R and R-PLUS have no books with their names in the titles, but of course the books on R apply to them as well.
Figure 6. The number of books that contain the name of each software package in their titles.
Impact on Scholarly Activity
While Internet search engines make it very easy to locate information about software, their inclusive nature make it difficult to narrow the search enough to determine the prevalence of various packages. For example, searching for the term “SAS” quickly locates the main web site for the SAS Institute, but it also ends up including many hits regarding a shoe company, an airline and the British commando group. Even within the realm of scholarly journal articles, S.A.S. stands for over a dozen terms such as Synthetic Aperture Sonar.
Figure 7a. Number of scholarly articles that reference each software package by year.
The more popular a software package is, the more likely it will appear in scholarly publications as a topic and as a method of analysis. Google Scholar offers a convenient way to measure such activity. However, no search of this magnitude is perfect and will include some irrelevant articles and reject some relevant ones. The final set of search terms is described at
http://librestats.com/2012/04/12/statistical-software-popularity-on-google-scholar/
. Figure 7a shows the number of articles for the most popular six statistics packages from 1995 through 2012. SPSS had a surprising advantage over most other package for much of this time. Its advantage seems suspiciously large, but after fairly extensive study of the articles returned by the search, it does not seem to be spurious.
Each year I collect the entire data set again, adding the previous complete year’s data to it. This ensures that the data are collected using the same Google algorithm, which is adjusted over time. The 2011 version of Fig. 7a contained a notable difference: the rate of decline in SPSS usage was leveling off between 2010 and 2011. This year’s search did not show that slowing and, in fact, the 2011 to 2012 change continued SPSS’ steep decline.
Use of SPSS and SAS in scholarly articles peaked in 2005 and 2008, respectively. The decline they have seen since may be due to competition from the other packages. The total of the other packages in 2011 is a similar to the amount of decline that SPSS and SAS have seen since their peak. If the trends were to continue on their current trajectories, scholarly use of R could surpass the use of SAS and SPSS in 2013. That’s a very big “IF” of course! See this blog post for more discussion of this forecast.
Since SAS and SPSS still dominate scholarly use by such a wide margin, I removed those two packages and added JMP and Statistica as shown in Fig. 7b. That figure shows the rapid rise of all software except Statistica. Note that the symbols and colors used in Fig. 7b do not match those in 7a. From 2008 on, R reaches the #3 spot (after SPSS and SAS) and extends its lead in consecutive years.
Figure 7b. Number of scholarly articles that reference each software by year, after removing the top two, SPSS and SAS, and adding JMP and Statistica.
Stata is also pulling away from the pack, which is interesting given the large number of similarities between R and Stata (see R for Stata Users, Ch. 1 for details). Systat is making a notable comeback after stagnating from roughly 1998-2002. The SPSS Corporation bought Systat in 1995 and did little to improve it. They sold it in 2002 to Cranes Software, who has been marketing it to the academia at an aggressive price.
The extremely low usage of Statistica is notable because of its relatively high ranking in some polls such as the KDnuggets one shown in Fig. 4. The ranking achieved in polls is a function of how effective a company is in getting its customers to participate. All companies do their best to get the word out, and some may be much better at it than others. Google scholar hits, on the other hand, are immune to such manipulations. Not shown is the Number Cruncher Statistical System (NCSS). Its use is so low that I’m not tracking it, but a manual search of the 2012 data showed that at 800 hits, its use was almost double that of Statistica’s at 465 hits.
Web Site Popularity
Another measure of software popularity is the number of other web pages that contain links that point to the software’s main web site. Figure 8 provides those numbers, recorded using Google on January 5, 2012.
Figure 8. The number of web site links that point to the main web site of each software package.
Now that SPSS is part of IBM, it dominates the results. This reflects the wide range of products that IBM sells, including computer hardware and services that have nothing to do with data analysis. However, the older SPSS.com website no longer shows up early in a web search and the IBM site that it redirects to has a tiny incoming link measure since it is not meant to be a direct link.
R is next in line with a little over half of IBM’s measure, followed by SAS with well less than R’s value. The other software follows in the order that I suspect is reflective of their respective market shares. Revolution R Enterprise and R-PLUS are commercial versions of R that are relatively quite new to the market. WPS is an implementation of the SAS Language and Carolina is a SAS-to-Java compiler.
The number of incoming links is an important part of Google’s famous PageRank algorithm (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
). PageRank is made more useful for searching by (among other things) weighting the importance of each link. Links from major sites like WikiPedia would carry far more weight than would a link from a professor’s course syllabus. The practical range of PageRank is from 1 to 10. Figure 9 plots this data (collected on on January 4, 2012). The software appear in tiers, with the two dominant players, SAS and SPSS (IBM), at the highest, and their well-known alternatives one level down. I find it odd that Stata is not in this level. At the very bottom are the World Programming System (WPS) and Carolina, two companies that use the SAS language. There have been quite a few changes in this ranking since last year, with SAS, SPSS and Revolution Analytics moving up one point and R, Stata and Carolina moving down one point. The R-PLUS site maintained its PageRank of 5 this year, which is a bit surprising given that many of its links are broken, and it is in its fourth year of saying, “Be the first to get R-PLUS 3.3″
Figure 9. Google PageRanks of each software’s web site.
Growth in Capability
The capability of all the software in this article has grown significantly over the years. It would be helpful to be able to plot the growth of each software package’s capabilities, but such data is hard to obtain. John Fox (2009) acquired it for R’s main distribution site
http://cran.r-project.org/
. I collected the data for later versions following his method.
Figure 10 shows that the growth in R packages is following a rapid parabolic arc (quadratic fit with R-squared=.995). Early version numbers of R increase by 0.10 while more recent ones increased by 0.01. To make the x-axis consistent, the graph displays simply the numerical order in which the versions were released. The right-most point is for version 2.15.2, the last version released in 2012.
Figure 10. Number of R packages plotted for each major release of R. The last value on the x-axis represents version 2.15.2, the final release in 2012.
As rapid as this growth has been, the data in Figure 10 represents only the main CRAN repository. R does have eight other software repositories, such as the one at
http://www.bioconductor.org/
that are not included in this graph. A program run on 3/19/2013 counted 6,275 R packages at all major repositories, 4,315 of which were at CRAN. So the growth curve for the software at all repositories would be roughly 30% higher on the y-axis than the one shown in Figure 10. As with any analysis software, individuals also maintain their own separate collections typically available on their web sites.
To put this astonishing growth in perspective, let us compare it to the most dominant commercial package, SAS. In its most recent version, 9.3, SAS offers around 1,200 commands that are roughly equivalent to R functions (procs, functions etc. in Base, Stat, ETS, HP Forecasting, Graph, IML, Macro, OR, QC). R packages contain a median of 5 functions (Rasmus Bååth, 12/1012 personal communication). Therefore R has approximately 31,375 functions compared to SAS’ 1,200. In fact, during 2012 alone, R added more functions/procs than SAS Institute has written in its entire history! That’s 701 packages, counting only CRAN, or around 3,505 functions. Of course these are not perfectly equivalent. Some SAS procedures have many more options to control their output than R functions do. However, R functions can nest inside one another, creating nearly infinite combinations. While the comparison is not perfect, it is certainly an eye opener.
IT Research Firms
IT research firms study software products and corporate strategies and provide their opinions on each in reports they sell to their clients. Two such reports that focus on data mining tools are here:
Forrester
http://www.sas.com/news/analysts/forresterwave-predictive-analytics-dm-104388-0210.pdf
Gartner Group:
http://www.spss.com.hk/PDFs/Gartner_Magic_Quadrant.pdf
Both firms rank SAS and SPSS as the top two and also predict greater than 100% annual growth for open source business intelligence software.
Job Market
Employment is important to us all, so what software skills are employers seeking? A thorough answer to this question would require a time consuming content analysis of job descriptions. However, we can get a rough idea by searching on job advertising sites. Indeed.com is the most popular job search site in the world. As their CEO and co-founder Paul Forster stated, it includes, it includes “all the jobs from over 1,000 unique sources, comprising the major job boards – Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs, Craigslist – as well as hundreds of newspapers, associations, and company websites.” I used a program that went there weekly and searched jobs descriptions for keywords such as “SPSS” or “Minitab.” This was repeated during the 2nd, 3rd and 4th weeks of March in 2012 and 2013. (The data were meant to be for the complete two years, but the automated process went awry.) The abbreviation “SAS” is common in computer storage, so I avoided those by searching for “SAS !SATA !storage !firmware” (the exclamation point represents a logical “not”). I focused on R while avoiding related topics like “R&D” by using “R SAS” or “SAS R”, including each package in the graph. The data for 2013 are presented in Figure 11.
Figure 11. Mean number of jobs per week available on Indeed.com for each software (March 2013) [last label should read "BMDP"].
Since 2012, job descriptions that included SAS declined by 961 (7.3%) and those containing Minitab declined by 154 (8.7%). Jobs for R increased by 497 (42%) pushing it past Minitab into third place by a slim margin. In fact, all packages except for SPSS and Systat showed significant though much smaller changes (via Holm-corrected paired t-tests (Table 2). Since these comparisons are based on only three data points in each year, I would not put much stock in most of these changes, but the 48% increase for R is notable.
Given the extreme dominance of SAS, a data analyst would do well to know it unless he or she was seeking a job in a field in which one of the other packages is dominant.
2012 2013 Difference Ratio 1 SAS 13234 12272 -961 0.93 2 SPSS 3299 3289 -10 1.00 3 R 1196 1693 497 1.42 4 Minitab 1769 1615 -154 0.91 5 Stata 842 898 56 1.07 6 JMP 644 619 -25 0.96 7 Statistica 61 71 10 1.17 8 Systat 14 15 1 1.07 9 BMDP 6 10 3 1.53
Table 2. Number of jobs on Indeed.com that list each software in March of 2012 and 2013. Changes are significant for all software except SPSS and Systat.
What’s Missing?
The most frequent question I receive about this paper is why I don’t collect data on MATLAB, Mathematica, or similar open source software such as Octave, Scilab and Sage. They are, of course, quite capable of doing data analysis. However, I did not collect data on them because their use is more popular in the fields of general science and engineering, not data analysis in the statistical or predictive analytics sense. Graphs from other sources, however, occasionally do include them.
The other thing missing is the discussion I previously included on Google Trends. That site tracks not what’s actually on the Internet via searches, but rather the keywords and phrases that people are entering into their Google searches. That ended up being so variable as to be essentially worthless. For an interesting discussion of this topic, see this article by Rick Wicklin.
Conclusion
By most of the measures discussed here, R is competing well with the commercial software vendors. However, I advise not over generalizing from this data. SAS and SPSS continue to dominate the corporate world and Stata is doing quite well in the scholarly arena. Each of these packages is dominant in one market or another. I’m interested in other ways to measure software popularity. If you have any ideas on the subject, please contact me at muenchen.bob@gmail.com.
If you are a SAS or SPSS user interested in learning more about R, you might consider my book, R for SAS and SPSS Users. Stata users might want to consider reading R for Stata Users, which I wrote with Stata guru Joe Hilbe. I also teach workshops quarterly on these topics with Revolution Analytics.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the following people for their suggestions that improved this article: John Fox (2009) provided the data on R package growth; Marc Schwartz (2009) suggested plotting the amount of activity on e-mail discussion lists; Duncan Murdoch clarified the pitfalls of counting downloads; Martin Weiss pointed out both how to query Statlist for its number of subscribers; Christopher Baum provided information regarding counting Stata downloads; John (Jiangtang) HU suggeseted I add more detail from the TIOBE index; Andre Wielki suggested the addition of SAS Institute’s support forums; Kjetil Halvorsen provided the location of the expanded list of Internet R discussions; Dario Solari and Joris Meys suggested how to improve Google Insight searches; Keo Ormsby provded useful suggestions regarding Google Scholar; Karl Rexer provided his data mining survey data; Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro provided his KDnuggets data mining poll; Tal Galili provided advice on blogs and consolidation, as well as Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow; Patrick Burns provided general advice; Nick Cox clarified the role of Stata’s software repositories and of popularity itself; Stas Kolenikov provided the link of known Stata repositories; Rick Wicklin convinced me to stop trying to get anything useful out of Google Insights; Drew Schmidt automated the collection of the data in Figures 7a and 7b; Francois Briatte provided the link that creates Figure 1c; Rasmus Bååth provided the median number of functions in an R package.
Correction
An earlier version of this document listed the number of SAS commmands in just Base and Stat as 647. The figure was later revised up to 1,200 by adding procedures, functions and commands from the SAS products ETS, Graph, HP Forecasting, IML, Macro, OR, and QC.
Bibliography
J. Fox. Aspects of the Social Organization and Trajectory of the R Project. R Journal,
http://journal.r-project.org/archive/2009-2/RJournal_2009-2_Fox.pdf
R. Ihaka and R. Gentleman. R: A language for data analysis and graphics. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 5:299–314, 1996.
R. Muenchen, R for SAS and SPSS Users, Springer, 2009
R. Muenchen, J. Hilbe, R for Stata Users, Springer, 2010
M. Schwartz, 1/7/2009,
http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/e6/help/09/01/0517.html
Trademarks
BMDP, Carolina, JMP, Minitab, R-PLUS, Revolution R, SAS, SAS Enterprinse Miner, IBM SPSS Modeler, IBM SPSS Statistics, Stata, Statistica, Systat and WPS are registered trademarks of their respective companies.
Copyright 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 Robert A. Muenchen
i’m not surprised that R, in particular, has done spectacularly well with respect to analytic use – it has, as best i can tell, virtually all the analytic tools one might need. I’ve been worried for decades now about the ever increasing use of excel for both data mgt and analysis. So many projects/”data sets”/ analyses have come our way in excel spreadsheets only for major problems in data integrity, tracing flow of data changes that led to errors, even analyses that were later found to be completely hosed because a user had done something as simple, and as deadly, as sorting a column instead of the records/rows.
What SAS has and,really should concentrate on, is its data handling, manipulation, organization, data validation features..that are all built into Base SAS. I have, and appreciate, your R for SAS/SpSS Users – and i can’t help but think that organizations that rely on both “data integrity” which, really, is SAS’ great strength and analysis could profitably use SAS for complex data manipulations and then write out files in one of the many formats R takes, do the analytics in R and pull the results back into Base SAS. A few months ago i helped out a friend who was analyzing generational data drawn from 80 + yrs from the complete medical birth registry of Norway. SPSS is the data manipulation software they use..and the task of linking families, sibs, half sibs with flags/subsets for individuals/families that had various birth defects over multiple generations was seemingly intractable in SPSS, whereas while it was a non-trivial exercise in SAS, it was certainly conceptually straight forward. And the resulting files could be analyzed in either R or SPSS, of course.(or SAS – which isn’t a package that they licence because of its increasingly pricey )
I’ve done quite a lot of complex data management in SAS, SPSS and R. To me they seem quite similar in capability except that R must fit the data into the computer’s main memory (unless you’re using Revolution Analytic’s version). Where SAS may have the edge is reading unusual files where you have to read some data and, based upon that data, decide what other data to continue reading. I see that type of data rarely and I’ve only read it in SAS. The others may be able to do it but I haven’t taken the time to see if they can or not.
“To me they seem quite similar in capability except that R must fit the data into the computer’s main memory”
I’ve been thinking about this lately, and I wonder if this might be a blessing in disguise? Every time our group hits memory constraints, we buy more RAM. It’s cheap, and it grows exponentially cheaper/larger over time. Of course, that doesn’t work for “very large problems”. But, on the other hand, there’s the MapReduce paradigm of divide-and-conquer. I don’t often encounter datasets that I can’t subdivide and process in chunks. Working with on-disc data is orders of magnitude slower (though SSD seems to help quite a bit), and so the dataset-in-RAM paradigm strikes me, after some thought, as a “good idea in disguise”.
See the bigmemory package for R:
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/bigmemory/index.html
Excellent summary, thank you very much. The exponential growth of R packages is impressive.
I am trying to catch how you measured the statistical softwares on the job market.
Indeed a research with just “R” leads of course to nothing meaningful. I would search for expressions like theses :
“STATA (statistic OR statistical)” = 627
“MINITAB (statistic OR statistical)” =1277
“SPSS (statistic OR statistical)” = 2488
“R (statistic OR statistical)” = 2957
“SAS (statistic OR statistical)” = 7053
which shows the prevalence of SAS, but to a less degree.
Many of the strings are easy:
JMP, BDMP Minitab, SPSS, Stata, Statistica, Systat
And SAS isn’t too bad but but you have to exclude any hard drive interface references for which SAS has another meaning:
SAS (excluding SATA, storage, firmware)
R is devilishly difficult to get. Since you found more jobs for R than for SPSS I’m pretty sure you’re getting mostly bad hits. You have to study a lot of the job descriptions to see what’s actually being found. Plain old “R” is found in many irrelevant situations. I use a Linux shell script that searches for:
(“SAS or R” or “R or SAS”) and it repeats that pattern for the above packages and MATLAB, SQL, Java, Python, Perl
After much study that is the only way I have found to locate “R” that is relevant. If you find another way, I’d love to hear it!
The whole thing is a Linux shell script written by a former research assistant. A variation of it which I used for figures 7a and 7b is described in detail at:
http://librestats.com/2012/04/12/statistical-software-popularity-on-google-scholar/
thank you for this stats article just what i needed
It would be interesting to include popular scientific plotting and statistics packages such as Origin Pro, SigmaPlot, and GraphPad Prism.
Nice idea! However, I keep pretty busy collecting the current data.
Where you say, “No other data analysis languages covered by this article even make their top 100.”, is not true. If you look at the portion that says the next 50, covering 51-100 you will see S, S-PLUS, and SPSS which are all data analysis languages. It is also debatable that MATLAB, PL/SQL and Transact-SQL could be considered data analysis languages.
Ken, thanks very much for pointing that out. One of the hardest things about tracking so many sources of information is noticing all the changes that are relevant! I’ll deleted that sentence.
This is a very good article. I especially admire the way you have tried to quantify various measures. It’s worth reading just to learn that you can use “not” operators on google and amazon. Most illustrative of trends in stats packages and languages. Thank you!
Thankfulness to my father who shared with me regarding this website,
this webpage is genuinely remarkable.
One interesting thing to look at could be comparing trends from the kdnuggets polls. You have the current year but there is also links to some of the prior years. For instance the following show two very different perspectives from two different points in time.
http://www.kdnuggets.com/polls/2011/tools-analytics-data-mining.html
http://www.kdnuggets.com/polls/2008/data-mining-software-tools-used.htm
I am not sure what all could be done with this but it would be interesting.
That’s good idea. I’ll do it if I can find the time!
I’m curious about a review of tools used by non-statisticians for analysis in business. Do you know what products that help smooth some of most basic data related tasks that the masses are currently doing in Excel — such as pivot tables, commenting and collaboration? I’ve been building one to try to answer this, and am curious about others!
Thanks for all of the details on tool functionalities and preferences for true big data analysts!
Fantastic! Is this published somewhere peer-reviewed that I can cite? I’m working on a journal article (which strongly discourages citing webpages) and would love to cite this as a source.
Sorry, it’s only available on this web site. I’ve had editors ask me to submit it, but I prefer to keep it as a living document that changes with the data.
Hello! Do you use Twitter? I’d like to follow you if that would be okay. I’m absolutely enjoying
your blog and look forward to new posts.
I’m @BobMuenchen on Twitter and I do tweet when each new post or article is finished. It’s certainly OK to follow me. I don’t tweet a lot, so you won’t be bombarded with crazy messages about where I’m eating lunch!
SAS just doesn’t seem affordable except for corporations. Do they even have a single user academic perpetual license?
SAS Institute never does perpetual licenses. A single user academic license is very expensive but they do make it very cheap per copy when you get an unlimited-copies license.
I have quite a wonderful “ANCIENT” book that has a comparison of Stats/database packages circa 1980 back in my office. I DO remember that back in the day….the yearly license for the “Statistical Analysis Software” package was $1000.00 for a university. If I could attach a pdf I actually scanned the chapter on “General Statistical Packages.” The book was basically the result of a survey of users…My favorite line: “More importantly, SAS’s users think almost as highly of this program as its developer does”
I use SAS & SPSS frequently for clients and like them both. But when I get to choose, I usually use R.
lovely post.
one tiny error– there are two captions titled the same serial “7a”.
maybe you mean 7b in the latter one.
That’s fixed now. Thanks very much for reporting it!
“quiet” under Fig. 1d should be “quite”
It’s fixed. Thanks!
Hello! I know this is kinda off topic however I’d figured I’d ask.
Would you be interested in exchanging links or maybe guest writing a
blog post or vice-versa? My blog covers a lot of the same topics as yours and I believe
we could greatly benefit from each other.
If you might be interested feel free to shoot me an e-mail.
I look forward to hearing from you! Superb blog by the way!
I’d love to see how Julia (julialang.org) fairs over the coming years
Do you think you can include more of KNIME in some of your graphs? I am curious to see how it compares. I use KNIME and I have seen it cited only in figure 3 and figure 4.
Hi Rosaria,
I started out studying just classic statistics packages while the data mining software came from data collected by others. However I do hope to expand the graphs next year to include them. There’s little real difference between the two types of software other than the user interface, which is better on most data mining packages.
Cheers,
Bob
This is absolutely amazing. Given the passion that most scientists have towards their software packages and that you are a self-proclaimed Stata user, I’m amazed that you can have such an unbiased and rational approach to answering this question.
1) There seem to be way too many stats packages.
2) I was happy to see Number Cruncher Statistical Analysis in there. The copy I have is 10 years old, but I still use it for 3d graphing capabilities.
3) I conducted a web search of “SAS vs Stata” because a coworker uses Stata and won’t shut up about it. I use SAS/Excel…and won’t shut up about it. My hypothesis was that my coworker is using an outdated stats package and he is stubbornly set in his outdated ways. This article mostly disproves that hypothesis, but does give me some ammo on the comparison. Thanks!
Hi Fred,
I actually use Stata only occasionally, and then usually just to study how it does a particular thing. My co-author Joe Hilbe is the Stata guru. It is a beautiful system though. You can tell that a tiny number of people cared about making its structure consistent. SAS, SPSS and especially R were at the mercy of too many developers so their syntax is less consistent. All four are wonderful packages though, and each has an audience that thinks it’s the best by far. I like ‘em all!
Cheers,
Bob
Great analysis, as always. This is a great resource for the entire analytics community. Thanks!
Hi Karl,
Thanks very much! I really look forward to seeing your survey results each time. Keep that data coming!
Cheers,
Bob