This blog post by David McKenzie and Miriam Bruhn talks about assigning treatments at random when stratification variables cause cells (unique combinations of stratification variable values) to have uneven number of methods. The provided Stata do-file is hard-coded for a six treatments and is a bit difficult to adapt for another number. I've made a module that does the assignment for varying numbers of treatments as well of providing different methods of assigning the remainder units ("misfits") from each cell.
The three main methods provided all assign the misfits at random and achieve cell-level balance (counts differ at most by 1):
To install the module, run
. net install assign_treatment, from(https://raw.github.com/bquistorff/Stata-modules/master/a/) replace
Tests are provided in here.
The three main methods provided all assign the misfits at random and achieve cell-level balance (counts differ at most by 1):
- full - This is the same method as McKenzie and Bruhn. The misfits from each cell are separately randomized to any combination of treatments. This can cause the overall number of units per treatment to be unbalanced even though they will be balanced at the cell-level level.
- reduction - This method achieves overall balance as well as better balance for specified stratification variables. It does this by limiting misfits to be assigned to a "wrapped" interval of treatments (e.g. (2,3,4) or (6,1,2) if there are six treatments) and then having those intervals dovetail together.
- full-obalance - This method allows misfits to be assigned to any combination of treatments and achieves overall balance. It does so by assigning units one at a time to fill repeating slots of (1,...,T,1,...T,...,1..). At each stage it keeps track of possible units that could fill a spot (without causing two from the same cell to have the same treatment). It randomly picks one and then attempts to fill the next spot (while giving a slight weight to trying to fit first misfits from cells with many misfits). If filling a spot is impossible the algorithm backs up to the last point where there was a choice and tries a new option.
To install the module, run
. net install assign_treatment, from(https://raw.github.com/bquistorff/Stata-modules/master/a/) replace
Tests are provided in here.
2 comments:
Hi Brian! STATA gives me an error message when I'm trying to install the module. I checked and the url is not working. Can you help me with this? Thanks!
What was the error. I suspect that it is because you were using an earlier version of Stata (the above works in Stata version 13 or later). If you have Stata 12 or earlier go https://github.com/bquistorff/Stata-modules and see the alternative instructions for installing. Thanks.
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