merlin - Stata version history on SSC

Last updated on Mar 25, 2019

This page details the version history of the stable version of merlin on SSC.

bug; poisson logl functions missed from build - now fixed
weights() added to allow sampling weights
at1() and at2() added to predict for difference predictions; hazard, survival, cif, rmst, mu, eta difference options added
bug; survival model using log time + interval censoring + left interval contained a 0, would error - now fixed

family(logchazard) added for general models on the log cumulative hazard scale
family(rcs) replaced with more general family(loghazard) for log hazard scale models
interval censoring added -> linterval() option added to survival familys, only allowed in one model
model-specific ifs or ins now allowed
bug fix; predict with ci and outcome() was ignored so defaulted to outcome(1) - now fixed
doc fix for knots() with family(rp) - does include boundary knots
bug fix for starting values with family(gompertz) which prevented fitting; now fixed

added error check for presence of * in predictor
bug introduced in 1.0.6 stopped matching of timevar() with rcs() variable; now fixed
error check on . caused merlin to error out when specifying decimal points in knots(); now fixed

previously undocumented random option is now documented - draws starting values from a U(0,1) distribution
chazard and survival predictions missing for family(exp); now added
note added to end of results table that baseline splines not shown when fitting a rp or rcs model
when specifying only a random slope with no random intercept - an internal parsing error occurred; now fixed.

ltruncated() added for delayed-entry/left-truncation in survival models. In models with random effects, the likelihood is divided through by the marginal survival function at the entry time, which results in a second set of numerical integration.

bs() element added for B-spline functions. Note; if you try and predict outside the range of the boundary knots, the spline function is set to 0 i.e. extrapolation outside the range of your data is not currently supported, and no warning is given if you do this.
minor edit to step size in numerical differentiation used in d?[] elements
mf() displayed function name left over from development; now removed
more error checks added
bug fixes

bug fix; at() was ignored in predict when ci was specified - now fixed
predict, failure removed, cif now used instead
predict, cif calculation improved for family(rp)
predict, cif and rmst can be used with competing risks
predict, ... causes() added for use with cif and rmst. If left unspecified, all survival models are assumed to be cause-specific models which can be overriden by causes().
predict, timelost added which is the integral of the cause-specific cif
predict, totaltimelost added which is the integral of the sum of all cause-specific cifs
numerical differentiation used internally improved, thanks to Mark Clements
subroutine left over from megenreg was required for merlin to run; now fixed
documentation for adaptopts() had unavailable options - now removed

predict, cif added to calculate cumulative incidence functions from a competing risks model
bug fix in predict, if neither fixedonly or marginal were specified, no prediction was produced; now fixed

predict, failure added to calculate failure probabilities (1 - survival)
predict, rmft added to calculate restricted mean failure time i.e. expected time since failure within the prediction time interval (0,$\tau$]
postestimation help file was incomplete for some statistics, now updated

merlin