

How Statwing (YC S12) Makes It Easier To Ask Questions About Data  - glaugh
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/16/how-statwing-makes-it-easier-to-ask-questions-about-data-so-you-dont-have-to-hire-a-statistical-wizard/

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jmduke
Statwing is cool, but IMHO it comes from people who have never struggled with
the problem it ostensibly solves.

Ask anyone who uses SAS/Stata/SPSS what their pain point is, and I guarantee
its not 'analyzing data nicely so I can look at charts instead of SPSS
outtables'. The hardest part is collecting and organizing data (which I'm sure
is a market Statwing is planning on entering.) Point-and-click stats software
is nice, but the people who are using SPSS and Stata weren't hired because
they could use SPSS and Stata.

(Also, I think its pretty disingenuous to compare SPSS output with Statwing
output, because it implies SPSS can't output a similar histogram -- which, of
course, it can.)

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glaugh
Cofounder here. Totally agree that the hardest thing about data analysis is
getting the data together.

But it's still true that once you have data, working with SPSS, R, etc. is a
nightmare unless you're trained or somewhat technical. I actually did work
with SPSS professionally for a couple years. And I was a lot like the roughly
half of SPSS users who are nontechnical, and only need the basic analyses.

The two biggest painpoints for these users are knowing what test to run when
and the difficulty of interpreting and working with the output. There's a ton
of people, particularly more technical folks, for whom those are not big pain
points, and that's fine too. They're just not in our target audience.

Also, RE the output comparison. Valid point if it looked like the implication
was that SPSS _can't_ output a histogram. Our point, though, is that we do it
by default in the three clicks that it takes to output text, and it takes a
lot more work to output even T-Test results in SPSS. Practically speaking,
day-to-day nontechnical users don't visualize much in tools like SPSS because
it's painful to do so.

Thanks for the comment, really appreciate it.

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bryanh
The little time I got to play with Statwing my impression was it is really
intuitive and powerful, but IMO the biggest hurdle is getting your data into
the app (or in this case, into a CSV first). Data sits all over the place, if
you guys can reach out and snag it for me after a quick OAuth dialog, that
would be a killer feature. I'd use it a lot, lot more.

~~~
glaugh
Appreciate that feedback. Sounds like getting data in is the theme of this
whole page of discussion, too.

We agree. Hooking into existing sources of data will probably always need to
be a big priority for us. Certainly not an easy challenge, but definitely
solvable, bit by bit.

~~~
kiyoto
Does Statwing have an API? If so, I am willing to write a plugin for Fluentd,
a versatile log collector (Disclaimer: I am one of the active contributors to
Fluentd)

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pyoung
I am currently working with some govt data. Not fun. If it ever got to the
point that I could log in and pull some summary stats from a variety of clean,
public data sources, this could be very useful.

For me the issue isn't the complexity of SPSS (or in my case SAS and R), it is
getting the data ready for analysis. Obviously I wouldn't expect Statwing to
be able to do that to my own data, but for public data sets, which I
occasionally use, it would save me a ton of time

~~~
thronemonkey
This is something that a favorite instructor of mine has stressed to me—the
most difficult part of data analysis (and the part in which mistakes are most
often made) is not choosing the correct analysis to do, nor actually
performing it, but rather manipulating the data into the necessary
shape/format. My favorite utilities for this are Hadley Wickham's plyr and
reshape (<http://had.co.nz/>) (not sure if you already use these, figured I'd
drop you a hint if not)

~~~
kylemaxwell
Take a look at Google Refine; for some use cases, it's just fantastic.

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jmitcheson
The Statwing homepage looks really nice. I think they did a good job of
something quite hard: making a data analysis tool look interesting!

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jgamman
my pain point over the last few years has been pulling data out of pdf
documents (ie govt departments think this counts as open data). I'd pay
through the nose for a tool that i could just dump pdf files into and have
them find tables and convert them to csv. even if it was only 95+% that would
save hours of tedious data entry...

~~~
_delirium
You might already know this, and it's not as automated as just dropping in a
file, but one option for extracting tables from PDFs (other than retyping
them) is the pro version of Adobe Acrobat. If you drag-select around a table,
you can right-click to export it as Excel or CSV, which works most of the
time.

