--------------------------
Maarten L. Buis
Institut fuer Soziologie
Universitaet Tuebingen
Wilhelmstrasse 36
72074 Tuebingen
Germany
http://www.maartenbuis.nl
--------------------------
--- On Sun, 31/1/10, Song wrote:
> I would like to fill the missing value in var1 based on the
> trend of the same variable (=var1) instead of using additional
> independent variable. However, "ipolate" requires an independent
> vvariable. How can I fill the missing value based on the trend
> of the variable itself? I would like to use exponential decay
> for var1, but a linear trend is also fine.
For a trend to exist there needs to be time, this is true of linear
trend or exponential decay, so "the variable itself" cannot have a
trend. This is the reason why -ipolate- requires an independent
variable. If you know that the observations are measured at equal
intervals and that the observations are sorted on that time axis,
then you can create such a "time" variable by typing gen -t = _n-.
If this is not the case and there is no time variable in your
data, then it is logically impossible to recover the trend.
Hope this helps,
Maarten
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