Verified User in Renewables & Environment

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

4/20/2023

"Must try, if you like working on R"

3.5/5

What do you like best about BlueSky Statistics?

It allows me to create, open & save R programs & reuse them. The best part is R automation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about BlueSky Statistics?

There is no specific problem with the BlueSky Statistics but R language itself is redundant in times to come. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Bob M.

Data Scientist

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

3/5/2020

"Good for Beginners & Advanced Users Too"

5/5

What do you like best about BlueSky Statistics?

BlueSky’s best feature is its ability to let total beginners interact with advanced R programmers in a productive way. The beginners quickly figure out how to point-and-click their way through analyses, oblivious to the fact that the R language is doing all the work behind the scenes. There’s no need for them to install R, that’s all done automatically when BlueSky is installed. That means that the frustrating R package management issue is handled automatically.

Advanced users can use it to generate bug-free R programs that they can then modify to their heart’s content. I frequently find myself forgetting how to get a certain graphics feature when writing code for R’s popular ggplot2 package. I then use BlueSky’s menus to create the plot & show me the R code it wrote. I can then paste its code in where mine had been in my R script. If an organization has a unique way of doing a certain analysis, they can add it to the menus for their non-programming staff to use.

Before choosing BlueSky, I studied the alternatives in great depth, and those reviews are on my website, r4stats.com. All of them offered a fairly wide range of statistical analyses, but BlueSky was the only one that included an extensive set of data management features. When analyzing data, we often spend more time getting it into the shape we need than we do actually creating statistical or machine learning models, so that's an important ability. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about BlueSky Statistics?

The main thing I miss from BlueSky is a Mac version. I’m a Windows user, but Macs are popular with our students. The BlueSky developers say a Mac version is on the way though. While most of the dialog boxes create clean "tidyverse" R code, some show some of the C code that BlueSky uses to write the R code. That's confusing to beginners & when I find examples of it, I report it to their support team so they can clean that up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is BlueSky Statistics solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use BlueSky to solve a wide array of statistical and machine learning problems. The statistical tests we often use include crosstabulation with chi-squared tests, odds ratios, relative risk, linear and logistic regression, and analysis of variance. For machine learning, we use decision trees, random forests, gradient boosting machines, neural networks, support vector machines, naive Bayes, and K nearest neighbors. BlueSky handles those & unlike most of its competitors, it can save and later open and re-use R's model objects.

We’re a major research university, and people use these methods across many disciplines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Steven M.

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

3/26/2020

"Great for learning R and flexible for more advanced users"

5/5

What do you like best about BlueSky Statistics?

BlueSky allows a user to easily jump into the R computing environment, even if they're not very familiar with programming. This gives them a whole host of statistical computing abilities.

In addition to flexibility for statistical computing, the user is also given the ability to do data manipulation. This is particularly difficult for new R users, and a user to BlueSky can hit the ground running here, too.

BlueSky has a paste function. As a more advanced user who doesn't remember all R commands, I've found myself going to BlueSky, pasting R syntax, and modifying. This is particularly useful with some of the more complicated statistics.

Additionally, I like the fact that the software is expandable. Users can create their own dialogues and address problems that BlueSky cannot address when downloaded. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about BlueSky Statistics?

Personally, I'd like to see structural equation modeling capabilities. I'd also like the multilevel modeling to handle non-normal data. And I'd like generalized estimating equations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering BlueSky Statistics:

I'd encourage anyone who needs easily conducted analyses along with flexibility to try out BlueSky. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is BlueSky Statistics solving and how is that benefiting you?

I've used it most for helping students who are relatively new to stats. I tell them to do something in BlueSky and then work with them to improve their understanding of what they're doing. Also, during COVID-19, a free and flexible platform is most welcome -- and this solves the access problem for many students and faculty. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.