-----Original Message----- From: David Heiser [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 1:55 PM To: ELANMEL Subject: RE: Diagnosing and addressing co linearity in Survival Analysis -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of ELANMEL Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2001 11:47 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Diagnosing and addressing collinearity in Survival Analysis Any assistance would be appreciated: I am attempting to run some survival analyses using Stata STCOX, and am getting messages that certain variables are collinear and have been dropped. Unfortunately, these variables are the ones I am testing in my analysis! I would appreciate any information or recommendations on how best to diagnose and explore solutions to this problem. Thanks! Elan ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- I see this as a deficiency in your software product "Stata STCOX". You should be climbing down the neck of the company that you bought the software from. Their manual should describe how their software arrived at that declaration, what was the logic that selected those particular variables that were dropped, and how to work around the problem. These software companies are strictly for profit companies. We should hold them responsible for bad products, just as we hold Ford and Firestone responsible for faulty products. These companies hire software programmers primarily to develop software that has a lot of "flash", just like a computer game. These are the "selling" features. Once the product is sold, they have no interest. It is up to the user to challenge the company and get the problems solved. We are seeing more and more of "users" getting their "advanced" statistical training from software manuals. We (the statistical community) should be putting pressure on these developers to put into their manuals all the text that would be normally found in a textbook on the subject. David A. Heiser ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ =================================================================
