Re: st: Mahalanobis Distances/Syntax/Stata

[David Kantor <kantor.d@att.net>]

To Anthony Petrosino:

I'm not going to try to understand the code that you presented.  But 
I should tell you that I have a set of programs, available on SSC, 
that do a Mahalanobis distance measure and selection.  Type
 ssc desc mahapick
to see a description, or
 ssc inst mahapick
to download it.

This works nothing like the code you presented (I'm not accustomed to 
thinking in matrices), though maybe the result is the same. (??) For 
each treated case it generates the distance measure in a (temp) 
variable; then it does the selection for that case; drops the 
distance measure variable, and goes on to the next treated case.  But 
there is an option for saving the distance measure variable in a 
dataset (long-shaped).

I hope this helps; good luck.
--David

At 01:40 PM 2/20/2007, you wrote:

> Hello colleagues,
>
> I'm new to Stata and to the list. We're doing a comparison group design
> and using Mahalanobis Distances on two independent variables to do the
> matching of units (schools).
>
> A statistician wrote syntax for us in Stata but hasn't done the procedure
> in a while and no longer remembered what each the steps means. I've tried
> to decipher the syntax below.
>
> Can anyone on the list let me know if we're on the right track here? For
> one, I think that step #4 below might be redundant with step #3.
>
> In appreciation,
> Anthony
> [...]
--
> Anthony Petrosino, Ph.D.
> Senior Research Associate,
> Learning Innovations at WestEd &
> Associate Director of Research, Regional Educational Laboratory, Northeast
> and Islands (REL-NEI)
> 200 Unicorn Park Drive, 4th floor
> Woburn, MA 01824 USA
> 781-481-1117
*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/