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…
The fourth quarter Stata News came out today. Among other things, it contains an article by Bobby Gutierrez, StataCorp’s Director of Statistics, about competing risks survival analysis. If any of you are like me, conversant in survival analysis but not an expert, I think you will enjoy Bobby’s article. In a mere page and a half, I learned the primary differences between competing risks analysis and the Cox proportional hazards model and why I will sometimes prefer competing risks. Bobby’s article can be read at http://www.stata.com/news/statanews.25.4.pdf.