Re: st: you estimated at least as many quantities as you have observations

[Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@ND.edu>]

At 08:20 AM 10/5/2007, Maarten buis wrote:
> You estimated a model with exactly the same number of parameters as the
> number of observations. People who don't know statistics often fuss
> about how many observations they have, that is not really the problem
> (though often a reasonable approximation). The real problem is how many
> observations you have compared to the number of parameters you are
> estimating. If you are estimating a lot of parameters you need a lot of
> observations. In your case you either have a very large model or a very
> small data set, either way I would not put great value on your results.
It is possible too that missing data and/or subsample selection 
criteria are resulting in a small sample.  If you think you should 
have a lot more cases than you actually do, check the descriptive 
stats for the vars involved in the analysis and see if there is 
something that is zapping your sample size.


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Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
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