Stata: Статистический пакет для анализа данных

Statistical software package

Stata ('/s//t//ei//t//@/, STAYta, alternatively '/s//t//ae//t//@/, occasionally stylized as STATA) is a general purpose statistical software package developed by StataCorp for data manipulation, visualization, statistics, and automated reporting. It is used by researchers in many fields, including biomedicine, economics, epidemiology, and sociology. Stata was initially developed by Computing Resource Center in California and the first version was released in 1985. In 1993, the company moved to College Station, Texas and was renamed Stata Corporation, now known as StataCorp. The current version is Stata 18, released in April 2023.

From its creation, Stata has always employed an integrated command line interface. Starting with version 8.0, Stata has included a graphical user interface which uses menus and dialog boxes to give access to many built in commands. The dataset can be viewed or edited in spreadsheet format. From version 11 on, other commands can be executed while the data browser or editor is opened.

Until the release of version 16, Stata could only open a single dataset at any one time. Stata allows for flexibility with assigning data types to data. Its compress command automatically reassigns data to data types that take up less memory without loss of information. Stata utilizes integer storage types which occupy only one or two bytes rather than four, and single precision (4 bytes) rather than double precision (8 bytes) is the default for floating point numbers. Stata's data format is always tabular in format. Stata refers to the columns of tabular data as variables.

Stata can import data in a variety of formats. This includes ASCII data formats (such as CSV or databank formats) and spreadsheet formats (including various Excel formats). Stata's proprietary file formats have changed over time, although not every Stata release includes a new dataset format. Every version of Stata can read all older dataset formats, and can write both the current and most recent previous dataset format, using the saveold command. Thus, the current Stata release can always open datasets that were created with older versions, but older versions cannot read newer format datasets. Stata can read and write SAS XPORT format datasets natively, using the fdause and fdasave commands. Some other econometric applications, including gretl, can directly import Stata file formats.

The development of Stata began in 1984, initially by William (Bill) Gould and later by Sean Becketti. The software was originally intended to compete with statistical programs for personal computers such as SYSTAT and MicroTSP. Certain developments have proved to be particularly important and continue to shape the user experience today, including extensibility, platform independence, and the active user community. ado files followed in Stata 2.1, allowing a user written program to be automatically loaded into memory. Many user written ado files are submitted to the Statistical Software Components Archive hosted by Boston College. StataCorp added an ssc command to allow community contributed programs to be added directly within Stata. More recent editions of Stata allow users to call Python scripts using commands, as well as allowing Python IDEs like Jupyter Notebooks to import Stata commands. Although Stata does not support R natively, there are user written extensions to use R scripts in Stata.

A number of important developments were initiated by Stata's active user community. Whereas Stata/MP allows for built in parallel processing of certain commands, Stata/SE and Stata/BE are bottlenecked and limit usage to only one single core. Stata/MP runs certain commands about 2.4 times faster, roughly 60% of theoretical maximum efficiency, when running parallel processes on four CPU cores compared to SE or BE versions.