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st: -stripplot- available from SSC


From   "Nick Cox" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   st: -stripplot- available from SSC
Date   Tue, 29 Nov 2005 01:25:43 -0000

Thanks to Kit Baum, a -stripplot- package 
is now available from SSC. Stata 8 is required. 

-stripplot- is an existing package renamed: 
it was previously called -onewayplot-. The 
.ado and .hlp are now revised in various ways. 

The previous name -onewayplot- reflected 
the name of the -graph, oneway- command available 
in Stata for almost all of its history until Stata 8
and still available, half-hidden, as -gr7, oneway-. 

In 1999, I wrote a -onewplot- program for 
Stata 6, which offered functionality 
overlapping with Stata's -graph, oneway-. 
This is still available for users of Stata 6 
or Stata 7 in the package -onewplot-. (The 
name reflected the 8.3 filename.ext length constraint 
that no longer bites.) 

In 2003, I ported this to Stata 8 as -onewayplot-
and added several handles. 

The renaming to -stripplot- reflects these facts
and guesses: 

1. -stripplot- is one character and one syllable 
shorter than -onewayplot- and probably easier 
to remember. 

2. The name "oneway plot", introduced in Stata 
in 1985, is in several ways a good one, but in 
statistical science as a whole I don't think 
it is going anywhere. In contrast, strip plots
appear under that name in several recent books, 
particularly those on or influenced by S-Plus and 
especially R. My guess is that this is a name on the up. 
(Most of the development of -onewayplot- was 
innocent of what was being implemented 
in S-Plus and R, as I don't have access to S-Plus 
and only occasionally look at R.) 

In contrast, the name -dotplot- seems popular in 
many quarters and likely to remain so. 

3. I doubt that anyone will really be confused
by the different meaning of strip plot in design
of experiments. 

So much for the name. The main substantive
change in this -stripplot- is that what was the -by()- 
option is now the -over()- option, and that 
there is now support for a standard -by()- option. 

This is in contrast to official Stata's -dotplot-, 
which supports -over()- but not -by()-. (There 
is no difficulty in principle here: changing 
the -dotplot- code to support -by()- is a few minutes' 
work, and has been done, unofficially, 
but that still leaves all the hassle of 
fixing the help, the dialog and the manual 
that user-programmers are happy to leave to 
StataCorp.) 

In some ways, all this is not a big deal at all, 
as after 

. sysuse auto, clear

. scatter rep78 mpg, by(foreign) 

produces something very like 

. stripplot mpg, over(rep78) by(foreign) 

But where -stripplot- comes into its own is whenever 
you want the data points to be stacked, rather 
like -dotplot-, except that -stripplot- offers ways 
of controlling binning and/or height of displays that
I consider more intuitive than those of -dotplot-. 

And also when you want several variables shown, 
rather than several groups. 

For those who might be interested further: the 
help for -stripplot- offers a very detailed comparison
of -stripplot-, -dotplot- and -gr7, oneway-. 

There are further enhancements to the code and the 
help, but I'll not spell out what they are. 

Separately, I'll comment on the revised version 
of -beamplot-, which is a closely related program. 

Nick 
[email protected] 

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