Stata

Stata (/ˈsteɪtə/, STAY-ta, alternatively /ˈstætə/, 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. A major release in 2003 included a new graphics system and dialog boxes for all commands. Since then, a new version has been released once every two years. The current version is Stata 19, released in April 2025.

Technical overview and terminology

User interface

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.

Data structure and storage

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 proprietary output language is known as SMCL, which stands for Stata Markup and Control Language and is pronounced "smickle".

Stata's data format is always tabular in format. Stata refers to the columns of tabular data as variables.

Data format compatibility

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.

History

The development of Stata began in 1984, initially by William (Bill) Gould and later by Sean Becketti. The software was intended to compete with statistical programs for personal computers such as SYSTAT and MicroTSP. Written in the C programming language, Stata was released for MS-DOS in 1985 with 44 commands. Since then, versions of Stata have been released for systems running Unix variants like Linux distributions, Windows, and MacOS. All Stata files are platform-independent.

There have been 19 major releases of Stata between 1985 and 2025 and additional code and documentation updates between major releases. In its early years, extra sets of Stata programs were sometimes sold as "kits" or distributed as Support Disks. With the release of Stata 6 in 1999, updates began to be delivered to users via the web.

Hundreds of commands have been added to Stata in its 37-year history. 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.

Extensibility

The program command was implemented in Stata 1.2, giving users the ability to add their own commands. 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.

User community

A number of important developments were initiated by Stata's active user community. The Stata Technical Bulletin, which often contains user-created commands, was introduced in 1991 and issued six times a year. It was relaunched in 2001 as the peer-reviewed Stata Journal, a quarterly publication containing descriptions of community-contributed commands and tips for the effective use of Stata. In 1994, a listserv began as a hub for users to collaboratively solve coding and technical issues; in 2014, it was converted into a web forum. In 1995, Statacorp began organizing user and developer conferences that meet annually. Only the annual Stata Conference held in the United States is hosted by StataCorp. Other user group meetings are held annually in the United States (the Stata Conference), the UK, Germany, and Italy, and less frequently in several other countries. Local Stata distributors host User Group meetings in their own countries.

Table: Releases and Development of Stata
Version	Release date	Select new or enhanced features
1.0	January 1985	Initial release Forty-four commands
1.1	February 1985	Bug fixes
1.2	May 1985	New menu system Better online help `keep`
1.3	August 1985	Stata/Graphics `program`
1.4	August 1986	New documentation Formatted `infile`
1.5	February 1987	`anova` `logit`, `probit`
2.0	June 1988	New graphics String variables Survival analysis: Cox and Kaplan-Meier Stepwise regression
2.1	September 1990	Byte variables Factor analysis ado-files `reshape`
3.0	March 1992	`logistic`, `ologit`, `oprobit`, `clogit`, `mlogit` `tobit`, `cnreg`, `rreg`, `qreg`, `weibull`, `ereg` `epitab` `pweights`
3.1	August 1993	`mvreg`, `sureg`, `heckman`, `nlreg`, `areg`, `canon` `nbreg` constrained linear regression `ml` `codebook`
4.0	January 1995	`xtreg` `glm`
5.0	October 1996	`xtgee`, `xtprobit` `prais`, `newey`, `intreg` survey estimation commands `fracpoly` `st` extended
6.0	January 1999	web aware new `ml` time-series operators `arima`, `arch` `st` rewritten
7.0	December 2000	`frailty` `xtabond` cluster analysis `nlogit` `roc` SMCL
8.0	January 2003	graphics extended GUI, dialog boxes available for all commands `manova` more survey more time series (VARs, SVARs) more GLLAMM internalization
8.1	July 2003	updated `ml`
8.2	October 2003	graphics changes
9.0	April 2005	mata matrix programming language survey features linear mixed models multinominal probit models
9.1	September 2005
9.2	April 2006
10.0	June 2007	graph editor logistic and Poisson models with complex, nested error components
10.1	August 2008
11.0	July 2009	factor variables `margins` postestimation command multiple imputation
11.1	June 2010
11.2	March 2011
12.0	July 2011	automatic memory management structural equation modeling
12.1	January 2012
13.0	June 2013	long strings treatment effects
13.1	October 2013
14.0	April 2015	unicode support Bayesian statistical analysis
14.1	October 2015
14.2	September 2016
15.0	June 2017	latent class analysis PDF and Word documents color transparency or opacity in graphs
15.1	November 2017
16.0	June 2019	frames (multiple datasets in memory) lasso regression automated reporting updated choice models
16.1	February 2020
17.0	April 2021	updated `tables` command bayesian econometrics
18.0	April 2023	Bayesian model averaging causal mediation analysis heterogeneous difference-in-differences

Software products

There are four builds of Stata: Stata/MP, Stata/SE, Stata/BE, and Numerics by Stata. 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. Numerics by Stata allows for web integration of Stata commands.

SE and BE versions differ in the amount of memory datasets may utilize. Though Stata/MP can store 10 to 20 billion observations and up to 120,000 variables, Stata/SE and Stata/BE store up to 2.14 billion observations and handle 32,767 variables and 2,048 variables respectively. The maximum number of independent variables in a model is 65,532 variables in Stata/MP, 10,998 variables in Stata/SE, and 798 variables in Stata/BE.

The pricing and licensing of Stata depends on its intended use: business, government/nonprofit, education, or student. Single user licenses are either renewable annually or perpetual. Other license types include a single license for use by concurrent users, a site license, volume single user for bulk pricing, or a student lab.

Example code

The following set of commands revolve around simple data management.

The next set of commands move onto descriptive statistics.

A simple hypothesis test:

Graphing data:

Linear regression: