RE: st: Re: Using NEARMRG

["MA V" <ma_v@hotmail.com>]

I know you're the author and I thank you for these and many other programs 
that have helped me a lot.
One of the things I tried was dropping all the duplicates for both region 
and age in the using file (before doing the merge):
duplicates drop age, force
duplicates drop region, force

This should have made the nearvar unique in the using dataset within levels 
of the varlist, right?

But I keep getting the same error message.

Another thing that I forgot to mention is that, in my case age is a string 
variable (and yes, I used the option "upper" to prevent getting error 
messages related with the fact that the nearvar is a string variable).

If you have any suggestions I would appreciate your help.
Thanks!



> From: "Michael Blasnik" <michael.blasnik@verizon.net>
> Reply-To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
> To: <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu>
> Subject: st: Re: Using NEARMRG
> Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 18:14:31 -0400
>
> I'm the author of nearmrg.  The help message is quite clear here and, 
> although you may have tried "many things" it doesn't seem like those things 
> included addressing the error message.  The nearvar must be unique in the 
> using dataset within levels of the varlist (region in your case).  In your 
> case, the combination of region and age do not uniquely identify the using 
> dataset observations and so the nearest match can not be determined since 
> there may be more than one.  -nearmrg- serves as a lookup function and you 
> have a lookup table with non-unique (and therefore ambiguous) values.
>
> The sort order of your data does not matter since nearmrg appends the 
> datasets together and does its own sorting.
>
> Michael Blasnik
> michael.blasnik@verizon.net
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "MA V" <ma_v@hotmail.com>
> To: <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2006 5:59 PM
> Subject: st: Using NEARMRG
>
>
>
> > I just came across a very interesting function named "nearmrg" and I have 
> > a question regarding its use:
> > If I write:
> >
> > neamrg region using ageinfo2, nearvar(age) keep
> >
> > In this case, I have the following questions:
> > 1) "age" must be unique in the using dataset, right?
> > 2) does the variable region need to be unique?
> > 3) how should I sort the variables?
> >
> > I tried many different things and I always seem to get the message:
> >
> > "region age not unique in using dataset
> > something that should be true of your data is not"
> >
> > Any suggestions?
> > Thanks for your help!!
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