st: Adding randomness to a variable

[Owen Gallupe <ogallupe@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Given the random number generator capabilities of Stata, I suspect
there is an easy solution to this which I just haven’t managed to
track down. Having said that, is there any function that allows you to
take an existing variable and add a small degree of randomness to it?
I’m thinking along the lines of a jitter option when generating a
variable. I know that this exact command doesn't actually exist, but a
command of the following form is what I’m looking for:

gen varx = jitter(var)

My idea is that it would take this:
5
6
7
8
9

And turn it into something like this:
4.73
6.11
6.80
8.34
9.09

I’m aware that the following two options would produce something
similar, but my idea is to manually create a variable that has the
exact properties I want for teaching purposes but then add a little
“error” to it.

a)
gen varx = .5*var1 + .8660254*var2

b)
clear
matrix c = (1.00, 0.30, -0.25, -0.10, 0.10, 0.20 \ ///
0.30, 1.00, -0.15, -0.10, 0.12, 0.35 \ ///
-0.25, -0.15, 1.00, 0.13, -0.08, -0.16 \ ///
-0.10, -0.10, 0.13, 1.00, 0.06, -0.14 \ ///
0.10, 0.12, -0.08, 0.06, 1.00, 0.001 \ ///
0.20, 0.35, -0.16, -0.14, 0.001, 1.00)
corr2data var1 var2 var3 var4 var5 var6, n(2000) corr(c)

Thanks!

Owen Gallupe

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