Hi-
I have a question that is more general than this list but I hope it's one that the group can comment on with relative ease.
(I know what DES and ABM are but this question involves simulation more generally)

I've been simulating the behavior of a population of women over 50 years.  As one would expect, it takes days and days and days in Stata.  That wasn't too surprising.  I know in some vague way that these kinds of packages have a lot of computational "overhead".
I know my really nerdy economist friends use Fortran and tell me it's 100s of times faster than something like stata or Matlab.

Here's my question-could I use R?  I know it and use it for other things and am quite comfortable with it.

Could anyone provide a ballpark sense of where on the continuum of simulation speed R would fall vis a vis Stata and Fortran.  Let's say Stata is a zero and Fortran is 1.  Where would R fall?  I know it would depend on the application, but still, it would help me to know whether R would be closer to .90 or to .09 or even .009.  (I also realize the scale probably should be logarithmic, but I'm talking ballpark estimate.)

I was actually surprised to find this list and that folks were doing ABM etc with R.  so perhaps R is a better substitute for fortran than I fear--

Thanks for your help

E. Michael Foster
Professor, Department of Health Care Organization and Policy
School of Public Health
The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Office Telephone:  205.934.6776
Office Facsimile:  205.934.8248

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1530 3RD AVE S
Birmingham, AL 35294-0022

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320 Ryals Public Health Building
1665 University Boulevard


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