In Studer et al (2011) an important new tool is introduced to the field of sequence analysis, the idea of “discrepancy” as a way of analysing pairwise distances. This quantity is shown to be analogous to variance, and is thus amenable to ANOVA-type analysis, which means it is a very attractive complement to cluster analysis of distance matrices.

This has been implemented in TraMineR (under R), along with a raft of other innovations coming out of Geneva and Lausanne. Up to now it hasn’t been available elsewhere. I spoke to Matthias Studer at the LaCOSA conference, and he convinced me that it was easy to code, and that all the information required was in the paper. This turned out to be the case, and I have written an initial Stata implementation. Continue reading Discrepancy analysis in Stata →