RE: st: Suggestions for Second Edition of A Visual Guide to Stata Graphics

[Fred Wolfe <fwolfe@arthritis-research.org>]

I reply with great deference. Nick is the master of graph programs.

Perhaps I am wrong about the difficulty of this task.

Consider subjects who take one or more of 10 drugs at two time 
periods. I want to show the proportion of subjects taking each of the 
drugs at time 1 and time 2.

Drug 1   .................X................Y.........
Drug 2   ........................X..Y................
Drug 3  .. etc

If each drug was a category within "alldrugs" I could do this easily 
(over(alldrugs)). Because this is not the case, I have to overlay two 
graphs, perhaps fiddle with scaling, and maybe multiply variables, 
and so on. Have I missed something easy?

With respect to multiplying by 100, here's what I think I have to do. 
Either clone the variables of interest and multiply them by 100 or 
preserve, multiply, make the graph, restore. While this is a trivial 
task, it is also a nuisance.

The issue that I am raising is not that these tasks are not doable, 
but that it takes time to do them. Sometime a lot of time if one is 
not so facile or if one is working with multiple data sets. I would 
rather spend time analyzing data than fiddling with graph code. So, 
it would be nice if a graph book could address a series of 
simplifying issues like this. Stata, lets me type -or- after logit or 
clogit so that I don't have to take the time to do exponentiate 
separately. Stata doesn't yet allow similar ease of use extensions 
such as I have specified.

I hope I haven't missed something very easy. Michael Mitchell's book 
might add additional value by addressing a series of issues such as 
these and showing programs such as you have written to facilitate graphing.

Fred

At 12:34 PM 7/25/2007, you wrote:

> Fred Wolfe replied to Michael Mitchell's request for suggestions
> on a second edition of "A Visual Guide to Stata Graphics" with
> several thoughts from his experience.
>
> I have extracted two comments here, which should be of
> interest beyond the book and before any second edition appears:
>
> > For bar and dot graphs, orientation is almost exclusively to over()
> > and by(). But I often have to make such graphs under circumstances
> > where over groups are not mutually exclusive. For example, instead of
> > having an over group for drugs that patients might take, I have
> > situations where patients take more than one drug, making the over
> > group option useless to me. So I would very much like to see an
> > expanded section on handling overlapping groups - or non-grouped
> > data. Too much group stuff for me, but perhaps not for others.
>
> I am not clear what the difficulty here is at all. Please give
> a specific example or more detail.
>
> > Converting proportions to percentages is a frequent task. Maybe
> > adding some lines of code to do simple tasks like this would be
> > helpful.
>
> Sorry, but what's the complication to be explained here?
> Multiplication by 100?
>
> Nick
> n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk
>
> *
> *   For searches and help try:
> *   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
> *   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
> *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/

Fred Wolfe
National Data Bank for Rheumatic Diseases
Wichita, Kansas
Tel +1 316 263 2125
fwolfe@arthritis-research.org

*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/