Multivariate and propensity score matching software with automated balance optimization: the matching package for R

Matching is an r package which provides functions for multivariate and propensity score matching and for finding optimal covariate balance based on a genetic search algorithm. a variety of univariate and multivariate metrics to determine if balance actually has been obtained are provided. the underlying matching algorithm is written in c++,makes extensive use of system blas and scales efficiently with dataset size. the genetic algorithm which finds optimal balance is parallelized and can make use of multiple cpus for a cluster of computers. a large number of options are provided which control exactly how the matching is conducted and how balance is evaluated.