plnepsmiss: run nepsmiss in parallel

nepsmiss is a highly relevant tool to automatically code missing values in Stata for all NEPS starting cohorts. However, the program can be slow as only a single thread is used. plnepsmiss parallelizes the process and speeds computational times up manyfold.

Installation

. net install plnepsmiss, from(https://raw.github.com/fbittmann/plnepsmiss/stable) replace

Note that the packages parallel and nepstools are required!

Examples

Setup and minimal example

use "SC3_D_12-1-0/Stata\SC3_pTarget_D_12-1-0.dta", clear
plnepsmiss, threads(3)

Reversing the coding

plnepsmiss, threads(3) nepsmissoptions(reverse)

Benchmarking

To test how much gains can be expected by plnepsmiss, a simple benchmark has been conducted (total of 15 simulations). Median times in seconds are computed for using a single thread (standard nepsmiss) and plnepsmiss (2 or more threads). The results indicate that massive gains are possible by parallelization.

Citation

Thanks for citing this software as follows:

Bittmann, Felix (2024): plnepsmiss: Stata module run nepsmiss in parallel. Available from: https://github.com/fbittmann/plnepsmiss