Matching Frontier - Unused Argument (outcome = "re78")

Question

I am following King et al's vignette on how to use the MatchingFrontier R program pdf here,

But I am getting the following error:

Error in makeFrontier(dataset = lalonde, treatment = "treat", outcome = "re78", : unused argument (outcome = "re78")"

I have found others get the same error, but no solutions. Some suggest it has to do with the version - the GitHub call installs version 2.0.3. I'm not sure what to do. Any thoughts?

The code I am using is straight from the vignette linked above:

library(devtools)
install_github('ChristopherLucas/MatchingFrontier')

library(MatchingFrontier)
data('lalonde')

# Create a vector of column names to indicate which variables we
# want to match on. We will match on everything except the treatment
# and the outcome.
 match.on <- colnames(lalonde)[!(colnames(lalonde) %in% c('re78', 'treat'))]
 match.on # Print variables in match.on

 # Make the mahalanobis frontier
 my.frontier <- makeFrontier(dataset = lalonde,
                         treatment = 'treat',
                         outcome = 're78',
                         match.on = match.on)

Answer 1

outcome is no longer one of the arguments to makeFrontier(), so it should be omitted from your function call. The package has changed since that vignette came out, so you should not rely on the vignette to be a guide.

The ?estimteEffects help page provides an example of how to use makeFrontier() and estimate the treatment effects. The outcome variable is supplied to estimateEffects() instead of makeFrontier().

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Edit 2022/03/01:

MatchingFrontier has been updated once again, and the syntax has changed. Version 4.0.0 is available on GitHub, and documentation is available here. Note this update fixes major bugs and introduces new functionality, but you should not expect results to replicate exactly from prior versions.