The 2011 Stata Conference in Chicago ended last Friday, and a good time was had by all.

The two days had the usual wide array of talks, given by researchers in Econometrics, Sociology, Medicine, and Statistics, together with three of us from StataCorp—Bill Gould, David Drukker, and me.

The conference was held in the Gleacher center on the banks of the Chicago River in Chicago (of course), which is a fine facility. I know it sounds mundane, but the acoustics in the lecture hall were excellent, making it very easy for speakers and questions to be heard clearly. Read more…

Between now and the end of the year, the annual Stata Conference in the United States will take place along with five other Stata meetings in countries around the world.

Stata conferences and meetings feature talks by both Stata users and Stata developers and provide an opportunity to help shape the future of Stata development by interacting with and providing feedback directly to StataCorp personnel.

The talks range from longer presentations by invited speakers to shorter talks demonstrating the use of Stata in a variety of fields. Some talks are statistical in nature while others focus on data management, graphics, or programming in Stata. New enhancements to Stata created both by users and by StataCorp are often featured in talks.

The full schedule of upcoming meetings is Read more…

David Drukker and I just got back from the Italian Stata Users Group meeting in Bologna, arranged by TStat, the Stata distributor for Italy. It was wonderful, in part because of the beauty of Bologna, and the tasty food. The scientific committee and TStat did great jobs of selecting papers and organizing a smooth, interesting meeting.

The first day of the meeting had talks by users and StataCorp. There was good variety, with topics like investigating disease clustering, classification of prehistoric artifacts, small-area analysis, and the careful interpretation of marginal effects. This year, all the talks were in English — and it was once again amazing to see how well people can present in a second (or third) language. If you would like to see the slides which accompanied the talks, you can find them at http://www.stata.com/meeting/italy10/abstracts.html.

Recently, I have been thinking about how to interpret results from nonlinear models, so I found Maarten Buis’s talk on “Extracting effects from non-linear models” and David’s talk on “Estimating partial effects using margins in Stata 11” really useful. Both Maarten and David have thought carefully about this problem and each of them presented great introductions and easy to apply solutions. What is interesting is they favor different solutions. Maarten leaned more towards estimating and interpreting ratios that did not vary with the covariates. David recommended using the potential outcome framework which can be implemented using the margins command. The similarities and differences in these two talks made them even more informative.

As is typical for the Italian meetings, the second day had two training sessions, one given by David on programming your own estimation command in Stata (starting from the basics of Stata programming), and one given by Laura Antolini from the Università di Milano Bicocca on competing risks in survival analysis. Both courses were booked full.

I was a Stata user for 15 years before I started working at Stata, and the most fun parts of the meeting are the same now as when I was a user: the wishes and grumbles followed by the conference dinner. The wishes and grumbles session is always interesting; it shows the wide variety of approaches to using Stata. The conference dinner is always fun, because of the conversation over excellent food. In Italy, of course, the food is beyond excellent; strolling through Bologna on marble sidewalks under colonnades while talking statistics, programming and Stata made the evening, if in a intellectual fashion.