There have been several recent threads concerning the -margins-
command. I wish to add one that indulges in a
bit of hyperbole.
The margins command is great. It does everything. It slices. It
dices. It makes julienne fries. Clients come in with
SAS and SPSS problems and leave with Stata margins output. Since
Stata 11 was released in July, I have used
margins on projects involving OLS regression, logit, tobit, poisson,
xtmixed, xtlogit, survey logit, and xtmepoisson.
Everything but factor analysis.
Of course, nothing is perfect. And margins has a dark side. Since it
does everything, it has a complex syntax.
There are numerous options. The options have options. Sometimes I
wake up in the middle of the night in a cold
sweat wondering if I should have used used noesample, asbalanced,
asobserved, atmeans, or at zero, omean,
omedian, oh my.
However, the positives greatly out weight any negatives. So, to the
Stata programmer(s) responsible for the
margins command, I salute you on this veterans day.
--
Phil Ender
Statistical Consulting Group
UCLA Academic Technology Services
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