Truncation and censoring are two distinct phenomena that cause our samples to be incomplete. These phenomena arise in medical sciences, engineering, social sciences, and other research fields. If we ignore truncation or censoring when analyzing our data, our estimates of population parameters will be inconsistent.

Truncation or censoring happens during the sampling process. Let’s begin by defining left-truncation and left-censoring:

Our data are left-truncated when individuals below a threshold are not present in the sample. For example, if we want to study the size of certain fish based on the specimens captured with a net, fish smaller than the net grid won’t be present in our sample.

Our data are left-censored at \(\kappa\) if every individual with a value below \(\kappa\) is present in the sample, but the actual value is unknown. This happens, for example, when we have a measuring instrument that cannot detect values below a certain level.

We will focus our discussion on left-truncation and left-censoring, but the concepts we will discuss generalize to all types of censoring and truncation—right, left, and interval.

When performing estimations with truncated or censored data, we need to use tools that account for that type of incomplete data. For truncated linear regression, we can use the truncreg command, and for censored linear regression, we can use the intreg or tobit command.

In this blog post, we will analyze the characteristics of truncated and censored data and discuss using truncreg and tobit to account for the incomplete data. Read more…

gsem is a very flexible command that allows us to fit very sophisticated models. However, it is also useful in situations that involve simple models.

For example, when we want to compare parameters among two or more models, we usually use suest, which combines the estimation results under one parameter vector and creates a simultaneous covariance matrix of the robust type. This covariance estimate is described in the Methods and formulas of [R] suest as the robust variance from a “stacked model”. Actually, gsem can estimate these kinds of “stacked models”, even if the estimation samples are not the same and eventually overlap. By using the option vce(robust), we can replicate the results from suest if the models are available for gsem. In addition, gsem allows us to combine results from some estimation commands that are not supported by suest, like models including random effects. Read more…

As stated in the documentation for jackknife, an often forgotten utility for this command is the detection of overly influential observations.

Some commands, like logit or stcox, come with their own set of prediction tools to detect influential points. However, these kinds of predictions can be computed for virtually any regression command. In particular, we will see that the dfbeta statistics can be easily computed for any command that accepts the jackknife prefix. dfbeta statistics allow us to visualize how influential some observations are compared with the rest, concerning a specific parameter.

We will also compute Cook’s likelihood displacement, which is an overall measure of influence, and it can also be compared with a specific threshold. Read more…

The new command gsem allows us to fit a wide variety of models; among the many possibilities, we can account for endogeneity on different models. As an example, I will fit an ordinal model with endogenous covariates. Read more…

If you have a bug in your evaluator program, nl will produce, most probably, the following error:

your program returned 198
verify that your program is a function evaluator program
r(198);

The error indicates that your program cannot be evaluated.

The best way to spot any issues in your evaluator program is to run it interactively. You just need to define your sample (usually observations where none of the variables are missing), and a matrix with values for your parameters. Let me show you an example with nlces2. This is the code to fit the CES production function, from the documentation for the nl command: Read more…

From time to time, we get a question from a user puzzled about getting a positive log likelihood for a certain estimation. We get so used to seeing negative log-likelihood values all the time that we may wonder what caused them to be positive.

First, let me point out that there is nothing wrong with a positive log likelihood.

The likelihood is the product of the density evaluated at the observations. Usually, the density takes values that are smaller than one, so its logarithm will be negative. However, this is not true for every distribution. Read more…

The manual entry for xtmixed documents all the official features in the command, and several applications. However, it would be impossible to address all the models that can be fitted with this command in a manual entry. I want to show you how to include covariates in a crossed-effects model.

Let me start by reviewing the crossed-effects notation for xtmixed. I will use the homework dataset from Kreft and de Leeuw (1998) (a subsample from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988). You can download the dataset from the webpage for Rabe-Hesketh & Skrondal (2008) (http://www.stata-press.com/data/mlmus2.html), and run all the examples in this entry. Read more…