Please check out this well-written article for answers.
http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/data/values.html
I found it by typing "findit missing values" in stata, another GREAT command.
Kaleb...
At 12:21 AM 7/3/2004, you wrote:
One thing in Stata that irks me is the treatment of missing values. Stata
(IMO) does not handle missings consistenly. For example, if I issue a
regression command, missings are recognised as missings and these values
are not included in the regression. However, if I type
gen x=1 if (y>10)
then x has the value 1 even if y is missing. In other words, Stata treats
as a real value. It's a problem that's easy to solve, but if you forget to
include "& y!=.", you can create problems further down the line. Other
statistical packages get this right.
I simply don't understand the philosophy behind the design decision. Can
anyone explain it?
Regards
Joseph
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