New subject: RE eziwin

9 Jun 2005

On Thu, 9 Jun 2005, fdmplimo(a)usp.br wrote:

...
  Dear professor King

 My name is Fernando Limongi. I work with Argelina Figueiredo taht 
 recently talked with you about applying your solution to the ecological 
 problem to Brazilian electoral data. I am using eziwin to get the 
 estimates of split or join vote on Brazilain elections. The program runs 
 only up to 3,000 or 4,000 cases. When I try with more cases, the program 
 does not run. In the software documentation there is no reference to 
 limitations due to the number of cases. Is there such a limitation? If 
 yes, Is there something that can be done to circunvent this limitation?

 I am trying to run the data on EI but Gauss is not very popular in 
 Brazil, so no one has a copy of the program. I tried to adapt your 
 routine with some others softwares but always fial for the missinf of 
 some of the programes invoked. With regard EI, Gauss is the only 
 software that runs it?

 Thank you very much for your time

 Fernando Limongi
 Political Science Department at USP

You probably have just a hardware limitation; if you used a machine with 
more RAM, odds are it will work.  But there are workarounds.  The key is 
that the basic model only estimates 5 parameters in order to get you 
precinct-level estimates for all n precincts.  The extended model won't 
usually have many more parameters.

That means you are using a lot of data to estimate those parameters and 
you could use less without much cost.  There are several options.  The 
easiest is to set _EselRnd to select (randomly) some fraction of the data 
in the estimation stage; you'll still get estimates for all quantities of 
interest at the precinct level.  The other option would be to run the 
whole analysis separate for different subsets (such as regions) of your 
data.  That too would work and would add some flexibility, allowing the 
model to fit the data better.

Gary

---
Gary King 
Institute for Quantitative Social Science
Harvard University, 34 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
http://GKing.Harvard.Edu, King(a)Harvard.Edu
Direct 617-495-2027, Assistant 495-9271, eFax 812-8581

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Re: RE eziwin