knitr::opts_chunk$set(collapse = TRUE, prompt=TRUE) library(optmatch)
When utilizing full matching, a user may want to introduce restrictions to the potential match sets. There are two main reasons to do this.
In optmatch 0.9-11 and above, optmatch
objects can be easily combined to facilitate breaking a problem into smaller sub-problems and reconstituting
a matched structure on the entire data set. To demonstrate this, let's consider the infert
data set.
data(infert) head(infert)
The "case" variable indicates treatment (1) versus control (0) status. We'll want to match upon "age".
table(infert$case) table(infert$education, infert$case)
Due to the sample size, if we were to compute matches on the entire data set, the fullmatch
call would generate a distance matrix of size $165\times 83 = 13,695$. However, if we were instead to compute a match within each level of the "education" variable, we'd compute three different distance
matrices, of total size $8\times 4 + 80\times 40 + 77\times 39 = 6,235$, a reduction of 55%.
We'll do this by splitting the data within each match.
f1 <- fullmatch(case ~ age, data = infert[infert$education == "0-5yrs", ]) f2 <- fullmatch(case ~ age, data = infert[infert$education == "6-11yrs", ]) f3 <- fullmatch(case ~ age, data = infert[infert$education == "12+ yrs", ]) summary(f1) summary(f2) summary(f3)
Some of the matched sets are quite large (1:5+) so let's put some restrictions.
f2 <- fullmatch(case ~ age, data = infert[infert$education == "6-11yrs", ], max.controls = 4) f3 <- fullmatch(case ~ age, data = infert[infert$education == "12+ yrs", ], max.controls = 4) summary(f2) summary(f3)
Now we simply combine the three matches.
fcombine <- c(f1, f2, f3) summary(fcombine) infert$match <- fcombine
within
argumentAn alternative approach would be using the within
argument and the exactMatch
function to define subproblems.
fwithin <- fullmatch(case ~ age, data = infert, max.controls = 4, within = exactMatch(case ~ education, data = infert)) summary(fwithin)
Observe that we obtain equivalent matched structure. A few notes comparing the two approaches:
within
argument, restrictions must be the same across subproblems. That is, max.controls
, min.controls
and omit.fraction
will be equivalent. By running the subproblems separately, you can set different restrictions per subproblem. E.g.,r
f1 <- fullmatch(z ~ x, data = d[d$group == 1, ], max.controls = 2)
f2 <- fullmatch(z ~ x, data = d[d$group == 2, ], min.controls = 1/3)
c(f1, f2)
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