Statalist


[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: st: Nearest distance (spatial) and shp2dta question


From   "David Torres" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   Re: st: Nearest distance (spatial) and shp2dta question
Date   Thu, 2 Jul 2009 14:59:10 -0400

Mr. Nichols,

I am thinking about your point regarding getting average distances from 
postsecondary institutions to potential students.  I may add this approach 
to what I'm doing, so any advice you can give on this and my current main 
approach is greatly appreciated.  Learning Stata is fun, indeed.

DT

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Austin Nichols" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2009 11:50 AM
Subject: Re: st: Nearest distance (spatial) and shp2dta question


> David Torres<[email protected]>:
> Each of (1) and (2) is easy to do (if time-consuming) with a single
> loop over observations.
>
> Note that the main trick in my code was to do
> a nonmatched -merge- to get both datasets in memory at once.  You will
> have to be a bit more clear about what you want to get more specific
> advice: "calculate distances between census tract and county centroids
> to the nearest [school] with population of the tracts or counties used
> as weights" sounds like you want the final dataset to have one obs for
> each institution with some kind of average distance to potential
> students, but (2) says you want one obs per centroid.  What are these
> calculations to be used for?  Maybe that answer will help clarify what
> you need.
>
> On (3), what data do you have?  Polygon vertices?  How big are the
> polygons (i.e. is the curvature of the Earth important)?  Is this for
> calculating centroids for use in (1) and (2)?
>
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 10:42 AM, David Torres<[email protected]> wrote:
> > Three comments/questions:
> >
> > 1. I was just browsing the web looking for something similar to Cox's
> > nearest .ado file and stumbled on the example Austin Nichols gave for
> > calculating distances between two different sets of xy coordinates,
> > originally from two different data sets. I am not familiar with the code 
> > he
> > gave so I have to ask: Is there an .ado file that can do all that work 
> > for
> > me? I mean, if I already have two data sets that I've merged, is there a
> > simple command I can input that will give me additional distance 
> > variables
> > to work with?
> >
> > What I'm trying to do is calculate distances between census tract and 
> > county
> > centroids (for the entire US, AK, and HI) to the nearest postsecondary
> > institution (of all types and by sector and control of institution: 
> > public,
> > private, proprietary, pub2year, priv2year, prop2year, pub4year, 
> > priv4year,
> > prop4year), with population of the tracts or counties used as weights.
> >
> > 2. I also would like to produce variables for the total number of
> > institutions that fall within a 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 100 mile radius 
> > of
> > each tract and county centroid.
> >
> > I can do all of this in ArcGIS, to be sure, but with eight years of 
> > data,
> > and ten different .dbf/.shp files per year, this would be a tedious 
> > chore.
> > I would prefer to spend an hour and write a .do file that will do in
> > minutes what it will take hours to do in ArcMap/ArcInfo.
> >
> > 3. The shp2dta command produces xy coordinates for area centroids that I 
> > am
> > not familiar with. Does anyone know if the code in the .ado file can be
> > changed to produce what I want--regular xy or lat/lon coordinates?
> >
> > With regard to the first two parts of my questions, here is Austin 
> > Nichols'
> > code, the first part of which I don't really care about:
> <snip> Any help anyone can offer is greatly appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > David Torres
>
> *
> *   For searches and help try:
> *   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
> *   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
> *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
> 
*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/



© Copyright 1996–2024 StataCorp LLC   |   Terms of use   |   Privacy   |   Contact us   |   What's new   |   Site index