I highly recommend Anthony Damico's excellent two-minute videos on programming in R. You can find the full list of 90+ videos here. This is the first of the series, which tells you how to download and install R:More generally, Anthony's video collectio... [Read more...]

It's been over four years that I've been using both R and Stata, but as of last week I've become an R convert. For several years I had conducted statistical analyses in R (since many complex models can only be programmed in R), but I used Stata before ... [Read more...]

As you can see, R is relatively popular (but more so on StackOverflow than GitHub):For the original graph, click here. This scatter plot is a reminder that R is useful to learn not only for statistical modeling (since there are so many excellent packag... [Read more...]

Stata has a large number of graphics capabilities (and I highly recommend Stata over other statistical packages for a variety of reasons), but in a few instances R is more useful. In particular, I find R useful for creating beautiful scatter plot ... [Read more...]

I've used both R and Stata for a long time, but these days I use Stata much more frequently than R. While R is useful for some kinds of graphics (especially three-dimensional graphics) and some statistical procedures (for example, finite mixture models... [Read more...]

The statistical package R received a positive overview in the New York Times recently. [Read more...]

The political scientist Drew Conway has come up with a useful list of his ten "must-have" R packages for social scientists. I agree with him for the most part, and his list highlights the usefulness of R (vis-a-vis Stata) for social network analysis (s... [Read more...]

For my "off-task" reading I recent perused an excellent book on multilevel and longitudinal modeling in Stata by Sophia Rabe-Hesketh and Anders Skrondal. The second edition (which I read) has been updated by including several chapters providing an over... [Read more...]