On Wed, 13 Dec 2017, Sven Schreiber wrote:
Am 13.12.2017 um 11:39 schrieb Filipe Rodrigues da Costa:
> I must admit that replacing
>
>> lad y const x
> for
>> quantreg 0.5 y const x
>
> works like a charm!
Interesting -- this kind of begs the question (not to you, Filipe) why 'lad'
isn't automatically using quantreg internally, perhaps after some heuristic
threshold number of observations?
Actually "lad" does use quantreg internally. But the quantreg code
comprises two algorithms, Barrodale-Roberts and Frisch-Newton, and the
lad command selects Barrodale-Roberts, which is slower for big data.
And in addition, lad calls for bootstrapped standard errors. The
reason for these choices is historical: it matches how "lad" used to
behave before quantreg came along.
I strongly suspect that what really slowed things down for Felipe was
the bootstrapping of standard errors.
Anyway, I guess it's time to switch lad to Frisch-Newton and not
bootstrap by default, though we could add options to do those things.
Allin