I last released SADI, my sequence analysis tools for Stata, in November 2011. Since then I’ve made various improvements and additions, relating to ongoing work such as that reported in Dept Working Paper WP2012-02 and WP2013-05 (the latter is an early version of a paper that is coming out in the book of the LaCOSA conference, due shortly).

I’ve written up a description of the package, including detailed worked examples, at WP2014-03.

To install the package, do:
net from http://teaching.sociology.ul.ie/sadi
net install sadi
ssc install moremata

The package is centred on the idea of calculating pairwise distances between sequences, where sequences are longitudinal (or at least linear) structures in discrete time, and a discrete state space. The key measure is Optimal Matching Distance, but the package includes a number of other measures, as well as tools for summarising and displaying sequence data.

It is fast, because it uses C plugins for key parts. This means it will only work under Windows and Linux (32- and 64-bit). If you would like to compile the plugins for another architecture (e.g., Apple) please contact me.