There have recently been occasional questions on precision and storage types on Statalist despite all that I have written on the subject, much of it posted in this blog. I take that as evidence that I have yet to produce a useful, readable piece that addresses all the questions researchers have.

So I want to try again. This time I’ll try to write the ultimate piece on the subject, making it as short and snappy as possible, and addressing every popular question of which I am aware—including some I haven’t addressed before—and doing all that without making you wade with me into all the messy details, which I know I have a tendency to do. Read more…

Leap seconds are the extra seconds inserted every so often to keep precise atomic clocks better synchronized with the rotation of the Earth. Scheduled for June 30th is the extra second 23:59:60 inserted between 23:59:59 and 00:00:00. Or maybe not.

Tomorrow or Friday a vote may be held at the International Telecommuncation Union (ITU) meeting in Geneva to abolish the leap second from the definition of UTC (Coordinated Universial Time). Which would mean StataCorp would not have to post an update to Stata to keep the %tC format working correctly. Read more…

Dembe, Partridge, and Geist (2011, pdf), in a paper recently published in BMC Health Services Research, report that Stata and SAS were “overwhelmingly the most commonly used software applications employed (in 46% and 42.6% of articles respectively)”. The articles referred to were those in health services research studies published in the U.S.

Good company. Both are, in our humble opinion, excellent packages, although we admit to have a preference for one of them.

We should mention that the authors report that SAS usage grew considerably during the study period, and that Stata usage held roughly constant, a conclusion that matches the results in their Table 1, an extract of which is Read more…

I’m still recycling my talk called “Mata, The Missing Manual” at user meetings, a talk designed to make Mata more approachable. One of the things I say late in the talk is, “Unless you already know what pointers are and know you need them, ignore them. You don’t need them.” And here I am writing about, of all things, pointers. Well, I exaggerated a little in my talk, but just a little.

Before you take my previous advice and stop reading, let me explain: Mata serves a number of purposes and one of them is as the primary langugage we at StataCorp use to implement new features in Stata. I’m not referring to mock ups, toys, and experiments, I’m talking about ready-to-ship code. Stata 12’s Structural Equation Modeling features are written in Mata, so is Multiple Imputation, so is Stata’s optimizer that is used by nearly all estimation commands, and so are most features. Mata has a side to it that is exceedingly serious and intended for use by serious developers, and every one of those features are available to users just as they are to StataCorp developers. This is one of the reasons there are so many user-written commands are available for Stata. Even if you don’t use the serious features, you benefit. Read more…

Do you ever fit regressions of the form

ln(y_j) = b₀ + b₁x_1j + b₂x_2j + … + b_kx_kj + ε_j

by typing

. generate lny = ln(y)

. regress lny x1 x2 … xk

The above is just an ordinary linear regression except that ln(y) appears on the left-hand side in place of y. Read more…

In part I, I wrote about precision issues in English. If you enjoyed that, you may want to stop reading now, because I’m about to go into the technical details. Actually, these details are pretty interesting.

For instance, I offered the following formula for calculating error due to float precision: Read more…

I wrote about precision here and here, but they were pretty technical.

“Great,” coworkers inside StataCorp said to me, “but couldn’t you explain these issues in a way that doesn’t get lost in the details of how computers store binary and maybe, just maybe, write about floats and doubles from a user’s perspective instead of programmer’s perspective?”

“Mmmm,” I said clearly.

Later, when I tried, I liked the result. It contains new material, too. What follows is what I now wish I had written first. I’d would have still written the other two postings, but as technical appendices. Read more…

Multiple-key merges arise when more than one variable is required to uniquely identify the observations in your data. In Merging data, part 1, I discussed single-key merges such as

        . merge 1:1 personid using ...

In that discussion, each observation in the dataset could be uniquely identified on the basis of a single variable. In panel or longitudinal datasets, there are multiple observations on each person or thing and to uniquely identify the observations, we need at least two key variables, such as Read more…

Merging concerns combining datasets on the same observations to produce a result with more variables. We will call the datasets one.dta and two.dta.

When it comes to combining datasets, the alternative to merging is appending, which is combining datasets on the same variables to produce a result with more observations. Appending datasets is not the subject for today. But just to fix ideas, appending looks like this: Read more…

When most people first think about software designed to run on multiple cores such as Stata/MP, they think to themselves, two cores, twice as fast; four cores, four times as fast. They appreciate that reality will somehow intrude so that two cores won’t really be twice as fast as one, but they imagine the intrusion is something like friction and nothing that an intelligently placed drop of oil can’t improve.

In fact, something inherent intrudes. In any process to accomplish something—even physical processes—some parts may be able to to be performed in parallel, but there are invariably parts that just have to be performed one after the other. Anyone who cooks knows that you sometimes add some ingredients, cook a bit, and then add others, and cook some more. So it is, too, with calculating x_t = f(x_t-1) for t=1 to 100 and t₀=1. Depending on the form of f(), sometimes there’s no alternative to calculating x₁ = f(x₀), then calculating x₂ = f(x₁), and so on. Read more…