All but optimal matching methods were implemented using a modified SAS® Macro based on Coca-Perraillon [ 20].
There are optimal matching methods that will break matches if doing so can result in a better overall matched sample, and it has been shown that there are circumstances in which greedy matching will find fewer acceptable matches than optimal matching (17).
By using one-to-one matching with replacement i.e. each hospital in the control group could be drawn more than once, the total distance between matched pairs was also minimized; known as optimal matching, this method ensures that conditional bias is reduced to a minimum [ 7, 9, 50].
The optimal full matching method, on average, offered the best covariate balance compared to stratification and weighting methods for both Bayesian and frequentist propensity score approaches.
On the hand, according to the feature of the target, the optimal feature matching method is selected, and the multi-feature crowd fusion location model is proposed.
On average, the Bayesian stratification method had 6.2 % wider interval than conventional approach, the Bayesian weighting approach achieved an 8.9%% wider interval, and the Bayesian optimal full matching method obtained as much as 14%% wider interval.
That is, although the frequentist propensity score approach provided slightly better covariate balance for the propensity score stratification and weighting methods, the two-step Bayesian approach offered slightly better covariate balance under optimal full matching method.
In every damping state of each semi-active damper the method provides the optimal matching values of the active forcing inputs.
Variational method reduced the optimal matching problem to the solution of a set of functional equations for the amplitude and phase of the wavelet spectrum.
The effectiveness of interval matching for reducing selection bias was evaluated along with the basic neighbor matching and the related caliper matching as well as other two commonly used matching methods, Mahalanobis caliper matching and optimal matching.
