Re: st: selecting random matched controls: survival

[Michael McCulloch <mm@pinest.org>]

Hello Austin, I really appreciate your looking into my question. Yes, 
the data are correct: for each patient (tx==1), I want to make sure 
that I select only controls (tx==0) who've survived at least as long 
as the leadtime for that patient.

And yes, I want to select without replacement (i.e. each control has 
only one chance to be selected, and cannot simultaneously be matched 
with more than one patient).

Thanks for the suggestion of the random sort. I'm unclear about how 
to select the first N matching cases; that's the argument I'd 
appreciate some help with. Since the dataset has hundreds of records, 
I'd like to be able to implement this as an argument which I state 
once and then the routine does the matching for all patients, 
sampling without replacement from the pool of controls.

Michael



> Michael--
> I don't understand your example data--is that correctly stated?  Do
> you want to select with replacement or without? The general problem of
> selecting for each observation a random subset of N other cases that
> satisfy some condition is fairly easy, though, if you generate a
> random number u, sort by u, then select the first N matching cases.
>
> On Dec 24, 2007 2:11 PM, Michael McCulloch <mm@pinest.org> wrote:
> >  Dear Statalist members,
> >
> >  I would like to ask help in a routine for selecting random matched
> >  controls in a survival dataset.
> >
> >  I have patients (tx=1) and controls (tx=0), and have _stset_.
> >  Time from diagnosis to death = _t.
> >  In the patients, I also know the time between diagnosis and treatment
> >  (leadtime).
> >
> >  I wish to randomly select two controls per patient, from among all
> >  controls who have survived at least as long as the leadtime for that
> >  patient. For example, subject ID==1 has eligible controls:
> >          ID==12 | ID==13 | ID==14
> >  Therefore, I'd like to randomly select two controls from among those
> >  three eligible controls.
> >
> >  ID      tx      _t      leadtime
> >  1       1       1.0     0.4
> >  2       1       1.2     0.3
> >  11      0       0.1
> >  12      0       0.9
> >  13      0       1.1
> >  14      0       0.5
> >
> >  May I ask how this can be done in a do-file or small program?
> >
> >  Happy Holidays to all,
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