2007 Nordic and Baltic Stata Users Group meeting

Announcement and call for papers This is the first announcement and call for papers for the 2007 Nordic and Baltic Stata Users Group meeting. The meeting is open to all interested. Personnel from StataCorp will attend, and there will be the usual “wishes and grumbles” session, at which you may air your thoughts to Stata developers. There will also be an optional dinner in a Stockholm restaurant on Friday evening (at additional cost). The organizers assume no level of sophistication for presenters or attendees. We hope that you will consider joining the meetings, whether as a presenter or an attendee. Source: Stockholm Visitors Board Photographer: Alexander V. Dokukin

Date: September 7, 2007 Schedule: 10:00 AM–12:00 PM Morning session 12:00 PM–1:00 PM Lunch 1:00 PM–5:00 PM Afternoon session Venue: Karolinska Institutet Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics Nobels väg 12A SE-171 77 Stockholm Sweden Cost: Conference only: free Conference plus optional dinner: TBA See Registration and details for more information.

Submission guidelines

Suggested presentation topics include but are not limited to Using Stata for modeling and analysis User-written Stata programs Using Stata to import and manage data Using Stata for graphics Teaching Stata Teaching statistics with Stata Surveys or critiques of Stata facilities in specific fields Software comparisons Please contact the organizing committee if you would like to discuss the suitability of a potential contribution. Submit abstracts electronically to Peter Hedström at peter.hedstrom@nuffield.ox.ac.uk no later than August 19, 2007. Please indicate the length of your presentation, which could be 20 minutes (followed by 10 minutes of discussion), 10 minutes (followed by 5 minutes of discussion), or some other length.

© Karolinska Institutet

Registration and details

To register for the meeting, send an email to metrika@metrika.se containing your name, affiliation, and contact details before August 31, 2007 (preferably much sooner). Please indicate if you would like to make a presentation (see Submission guidelines above).

Satellite meetings on Thursday, September 6, 2007

There will be two satellite meetings:

1. Methods for studying cancer patient survival with application in Stata
   Course leader: Paul Dickman
   Relative survival is the outcome measure of choice for studying cancer patient survival by using data collected by population-based cancer survival. The aim of this workshop is to discuss and compare approaches to estimating and modeling relative survival (excess mortality) and their application in Stata. The workshop will include presentations from invited speakers who have developed methodology that is implemented in Stata. Speakers include Paul Dickman (estimating and modeling relative survival, the strs command), Paul Lambert (cure models, the strsmix and strsnmix commands), Bernard Rachet (estimating relative survival by using the strel command, modeling using fractional polynomials and splines, modeling and smoothing population mortality rates), Chris Nelson (fitting spline functions for relative survival models, the strsrcs command) and Ula Nur (modeling relative survival in the presence of incomplete data). The primary focus will be on approaches to modeling excess mortality, particularly when proportional excess hazards are appropriate. Many of the approaches to modeling differ only in the method used for modeling the baseline hazard; the various approaches will be discussed from both a theoretical and practical approach. All speakers will use standard datasets in their presentations to facilitate comparison of the various approaches. These datasets will be distributed to all participants in advance (along with research questions to be explored) and Stata code presented during the workshop will be available on the web. We will discuss proposals for future methodological development and possible collaboration, as well as possibilities for standardizing the Stata commands (at least to the extent it is possible). The workshop is aimed at participants who have prior knowledge of methods for population-based cancer survival analysis or have a very strong background in medical statistics and Stata.
2. Using Stata for agent-based modeling
   Course leader: Peter Hedström
   Agent-based modeling is a simulation-based approach which is becoming increasingly important in the social sciences. It seeks to analyze the social outcomes that groups of virtual agents (e.g., individuals) are likely to bring about when they act and interact with one another, and how these outcomes depend upon the properties of the agents and the social networks in which they are embedded. In this workshop we focus on how Stata can be used for such analyses. Some of the programs introduced in the workshop are used for generating the environments in which agents are embedded—the networks—and other programs are used for analyzing what the agents are likely to bring about when placed in such environments. The workshop assumes no previous knowledge of agent-based modeling but assumes a basic knowledge of Stata.

We will give more details of these satellite meetings (including how to register) soon. These meetings may be canceled if not enough people sign up.

Organizers

The meeting is jointly organized by Metrika Consulting (www.metrika.se), the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet (www.meb.ki.se), and the Department of Nutritional Epidemiology, National Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet (http://ki.se/IMM).

Metrika is the certified exclusive distributor of Stata in the Nordic and Baltic regions. For more information, contact them at metrika@metrika.se.

The Nordic and Baltic Stata Users Group organizing committee