### Archive

Posts Tagged ‘statistics’

## Ermistatas and Stata’s new ERMs commands

Ermistatas is our most popular t-shirt these days. See it and you will understand why.

We call the character Ermistatas and he is thinking—Ermistatas cogitatu. Notice the electricity bolts being emitted and received by his three antennae.

The shirt is popular even among those who do not use Stata and it’s leading them to ask questions. “Who or what is Ermistatas and why is he, she, or it deserving of a t-shirt?”. Then they add, “And why three and not the usual two antennae?”

Ermistatas is the creation of our arts-and-graphics department to represent Stata 15’s new commands for fitting Extended Regression Models—a term we coined. We call it ERMs for short. The new commands are Read more…

## Introduction to Bayesian statistics, part 2: MCMC and the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm

In this blog post, I’d like to give you a relatively nontechnical introduction to Markov chain Monte Carlo, often shortened to “MCMC”. MCMC is frequently used for fitting Bayesian statistical models. There are different variations of MCMC, and I’m going to focus on the Metropolis–Hastings (M–H) algorithm. In the interest of brevity, I’m going to omit some details, and I strongly encourage you to read the [BAYES] manual before using MCMC in practice.

Let’s continue with the coin toss example from my previous post Introduction to Bayesian statistics, part 1: The basic concepts. We are interested in the posterior distribution of the parameter $$\theta$$, which is the probability that a coin toss results in “heads”. Our prior distribution is a flat, uninformative beta distribution with parameters 1 and 1. And we will use a binomial likelihood function to quantify the data from our experiment, which resulted in 4 heads out of 10 tosses. Read more…

Categories: Statistics Tags:

## Introduction to Bayesian statistics, part 1: The basic concepts

In this blog post, I’d like to give you a relatively nontechnical introduction to Bayesian statistics. The Bayesian approach to statistics has become increasingly popular, and you can fit Bayesian models using the bayesmh command in Stata. This blog entry will provide a brief introduction to the concepts and jargon of Bayesian statistics and the bayesmh syntax. In my next post, I will introduce the basics of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) using the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm. Read more…

Categories: Statistics Tags:

## Programming an estimation command in Stata: Adding analytical derivatives to a poisson command using Mata


This is the twenty-third post in the series Programming an estimation command in Stata. I recommend that you start at the beginning. See Programming an estimation command in Stata: A map to posted entries for a map to all the posts in this series.

Analytically computed derivatives for Poisson

The contribution of the i(th) observation to the log-likelihood function for the Poisson maximum-likelihood estimator is Read more…

Categories: Programming Tags:

## Programming an estimation command in Stata: Allowing for robust or cluster–robust standard errors in a poisson command using Mata

mypoisson3.ado adds options for a robust or a cluster–robust estimator of the variance–covariance of the estimator (VCE) to mypoisson2.ado, which I discussed in Programming an estimation command in Stata: Handling factor variables in a poisson command using Mata. mypoisson3.ado parses the vce() option using the techniques I discussed in Programming an estimation command in Stata: Adding robust and cluster–robust VCEs to our Mata based OLS command. Below, I show how to use optimize() to compute the robust or cluster–robust VCE.

I only discuss what is new in the code for mypoisson3.ado, assuming that you are familiar with mypoisson2.ado.

This is the twenty-second post in the series Programming an estimation command in Stata. I recommend that you start at the beginning. See Programming an estimation command in Stata: A map to posted entries for a map to all the posts in this series.

A poisson command with options for a robust or a cluster–robust VCE

mypoisson3 computes Poisson-regression results in Mata. The syntax of the mypoisson3 command is

mypoisson3 depvar indepvars [if] [in] [, vce(robust | cluster clustervar) noconstant]

where indepvars can contain factor variables or time-series variables.

In the remainder of this post, I discuss Read more…

Categories: Programming Tags:

## Programming an estimation command in Stata: Handling factor variables in a poisson command using Mata

mypoisson2.ado handles factor variables and computes its Poisson regression results in Mata. I discuss the code for mypoisson2.ado, which I obtained by adding the method for handling factor variables discussed in Programming an estimation command in Stata: Handling factor variables in optimize() to mypoisson1.ado, discussed in Programming an estimation command in Stata: A poisson command using Mata.

This is the twenty-first post in the series Programming an estimation command in Stata. I recommend that you start at the beginning. See Programming an estimation command in Stata: A map to posted entries for a map to all the posts in this series.

A Poisson command with Mata computations

mypoisson2 computes Poisson regression results in Mata. The syntax of the mypoisson2 command is

mypoisson2 depvar indepvars [if] [in] [, noconstant]

where indepvars can contain factor variables or time-series variables.

In the remainder of this post, I discuss Read more…

Categories: Programming Tags:

## Programming an estimation command in Stata: Handling factor variables in optimize()


This is the twenty post in the series Programming an estimation command in Stata. I recommend that you start at the beginning. See Programming an estimation command in Stata: A map to posted entries for a map to all the posts in this series.

How poisson handles factor variables

Consider the Poisson regression in which I include a full set of indicator variables created from Read more…

Categories: Programming Tags:

## Programming an estimation command in Stata: A poisson command using Mata


I build on previous posts. I use the structure of Stata programs that use Mata work functions that I discussed previously in Programming an estimation command in Stata: A first ado-command using Mata and Programming an estimation command in Stata: An OLS command using Mata. You should be familiar with Read more…

Categories: Programming Tags:

## Programming an estimation command in Stata: Using optimize() to estimate Poisson parameters


This is the eighteenth post in the series Programming an estimation command in Stata. I recommend that you start at the beginning. See Programming an estimation command in Stata: A map to posted entries for a map to all the posts in this series.

Using optimize()

There are many optional choices that one may make when solving a nonlinear optimization problem, but there are very few that one must make. The optimize*() functions in Mata handle this problem by making a set of default choices for you, requiring that you specify a few things, and allowing you to change any of the default choices.

When I use optimize() to solve a Read more…

Categories: Programming Tags:

## Programming an estimation command in Stata: A review of nonlinear optimization using Mata


This is the seventeenth post in the series Programming an estimation command in Stata. I recommend that you start at the beginning. See Programming an estimation command in Stata: A map to posted entries for a map to all the posts in this series.

A quick review of nonlinear optimization

We want to maximize a real-valued function $$Q(\thetab)$$, where $$\thetab$$ is a $$p\times 1$$ vector of parameters. Minimization is done by maximizing $$-Q(\thetab)$$. We require that $$Q(\thetab)$$ is twice, continuously differentiable, so that we can use a second-order Taylor series to approximate $$Q(\thetab)$$ in a neighborhood of the point $$\thetab_s$$,

$Q(\thetab) \approx Q(\thetab_s) + \gb_s'(\thetab -\thetab_s) + \frac{1}{2} (\thetab -\thetab_s)’\Hb_s (\thetab -\thetab_s) \tag{1}$

where $$\gb_s$$ is the $$p\times 1$$ vector of first derivatives of $$Q(\thetab)$$ evaluated at $$\thetab_s$$ and $$\Hb_s$$ is the $$p\times p$$ matrix of second derivatives of $$Q(\thetab)$$ evaluated at $$\thetab_s$$, known as the Hessian matrix.