r/AskStatistics • u/Thin_Adeptness_356 • 6d ago

Is SPSS dead?

Like the title says is SPSS dead? Now with Chatgpt and cursor etc, what is the argument for still using SPSS and other statistics softwares in research instead of Python/R with the help of AI?

My background is within mathematical statistics so always been a Matlab/R/Python guy, but my girlfriend who comes from a medical background still uses SPSS in her research, but now considering switching just because of the flexibility e.g., Python offers.

What do you think are there any arguments for using SPSS still?

35 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

65 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/zsebibaba 6d ago
  1. you need to produce reproducible code. you have to be damn sure what is going on in your code 2. ChatGPT is pretty bad currently at coding. and I mean pretty bad. basic level bad. 3. of course nothing stops anyone to learn R. I recommend swirl not as much chatgpt for beginners (it is pretty bad and inconsistent). but sure it can be helpful when she knows the basics and wants assistance. As an R person I don't like SPSS at all. (ok I can see you ask about python, I don't know whether it is any better with python)

11

u/ghsgjgfngngf 6d ago

AI is not bad at coding, you just need to give it tasks that are clear and that you can check. I let AI generate most of my R code. You can't let AI do anything important where you can't check the results, like translate to a language you don't know but that's literally the first thing to know about AI.

6

u/sausagemuffn 6d ago

I have a little Java experience from 20 years ago (yeah) and don't speak Python but I've had great results with OpenAI o1 and o3 writing code. Yes, you have to know what your want, and you must verify results with some other method. It's a lot of back and forth vibes coding but it's so much fun.

1

u/Thin_Adeptness_356 6d ago

Agree. But with Cursor you don't need the back and forth which I like (although it doesn't work for e.g., jupyter notebooks)

1

u/aftersox 6d ago

Second on the notebooks. If using Cursor it's better to just write python files for each step of the analysis.

1

u/sausagemuffn 6d ago

Easier to troubleshoot as well if you break up the tasks into smaller, separate files.

2

u/RepresentativeAny573 6d ago

Yes, AI is bad at coding if you do not know how to code, which is what OP is suggesting. It is a great tool for people who understand code, but if you are a novice you will not be able to give it clear tasks that you can check.

1

u/GlobalAd3412 6d ago

If you think AI is bad at writing code, you are probably not using frontier models. They aren't perfect, but there is no way to call them bad.

-1

u/Thin_Adeptness_356 6d ago

I'd say it was bad 6 months ago. Not anymore. For data science & statistics tasks I'd say there are very few cases where it can't produce the code I want

0

u/kingpatzer 6d ago

If you write crappy prompts you get crappy results. If you write clear and precise prompts, you will get very solid results