Stat Computing

Email Consulting Service

The UCLA ATS Statistical Consulting Group offers email statistical consulting services to UCLA faculty, staff and graduate students working on research projects.  The service is free of charge.

• Email address:  Please send your email question to  .  We request that questions not be sent to individual consultants.
• Response time:  Emails questions are usually answered within 1-2 business days.
• Affiliation:  If you are a member of the UCLA research community, but are sending your question from a non-UCLA email account (e.g., hotmail, gmail, etc.), please be sure to indicate in your email your affiliation with UCLA.
• Stat package:  Please indicate which statistical package you are using (e.g., SAS, Stata, SPSS, etc.).  It is also often helpful if you include the version of the software and the platform on which you are running the software (e.g., Windows, Mac, etc.). 
• Information to include:  If you are having difficulty with a certain task, especially a data management task, please be sure to include in your email:
  • a clear description of the task that you are trying to accomplish
  • the code that you used to accomplish this task
  • the error message issued or the reason you believe the task was not successfully accomplished.
• Files to include:  If it helps explain your question or questions, you can include your data file, program file and/or output file. 
  • If you send an output file, please also include the syntax that generated the output (you can include that in the body of the email or as a separate attachment). 
  • If you send a data file, please include only the relevant variables.
• Sample email questions:
  • In my model, the interaction of a categorical variable and a continuous variable is statistically significant.  I would like to graph this two-way interaction in SPSS.  Could you tell me how to graph it in SPSS?
  • I am using proc gplot in SAS.  If I want to label my points, how do I go about it?
  • I am running xtmixed in Stata, how do I calculate the intraclass correlation based on the output of the model?
• When to come to walk-in consulting:  If you find yourself spending a long time writing an email question or if you think it will take a long time to explain your situation/question, it usually means that your question is too complicated for email consulting, and it might be time to make a visit to our walk-in consulting.  Please visit out walk-in consulting page for walk-in consulting hours and other related information.  Please note that we cannot provide assistance to undergraduate students or graduate students who are working on homework, papers or projects for a class.

Other UCLA ATS Statistical Consulting Services

• Walk-in consulting:  Please visit out walk-in consulting page for walk-in consulting hours and other related information.
• Mailing list:  If you join the ATSstat-L mailing list you will receive email about 2-4 times per month announcing updates to the consulting schedule, future classes and seminars, and updates to our web pages.
• Classes and Seminars:  We have over 45 online seminars that you can access 24/7 by visiting our Classes and Seminars.
• Live seminars:  presented Winter Quarter, 2008
  • Writing Statistical Results, Tuesday, February 5 from 4-6 p.m. in MS 5628.
  • Introduction to Power Analysis, Tuesday February 12 from 4-6 p.m. in MS 5628.
  • There’s Something About Statistics…and Data at the UCLA Library, Wednesday, February 13 from 3-5 p.m. in the Research Library East Electronic Classroom, YRL 21536.
• Stat Books for Loan:  Books may be borrowed and returned during our walk-in consulting hours.  For a list of books available and our lending policy, please see our Stat Books for Loan page.

Other statistical consulting services on campus

• Statistical Biomathematical Consulting Clinic
• Statistics Tutors within the UCLA Statistics Department

UCLA Researchers are invited to our Statistical Consulting Services
We recommend others to our list of Other Resources for Statistical Computing Help
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