Title
[U] 19 Immediate commands
Remarks
An immediate command is a command that obtains data not from the data
stored in memory but from numbers typed as arguments. Immediate
commands, in effect, turn Stata into a glorified hand calculator.
Sometimes you may not have the data, but you know something about the
data and what you do know is adequate to perform the statistical test.
Immediate commands have the following properties:
1. They never disturb the data in memory.
2. The syntax for all is the same: the command name followed by
numbers that are the summary statistics from which the statistic
is calculated.
3. Immediate commands end in the letter i, although the converse is
not true.
4. Immediate commands are documented along with their nonimmediate
cousins.
Immediate commands include the following:
Command Description
---------------------------------------------------------------------
bitesti Binomial probability test
cci Tables for epidemiologists; see [R] epitab
csi
iri
mcci
cii Confidence intervals for means, proportions, counts
esizei Effects size based on mean comparison
prtesti One- and two-sample tests of proportions
sdtesti Variance comparison tests
symmi Symmetry and marginal homogeneity tests
tabi One- and two-way tables of frequencies
ttesti t tests (mean-comparison tests)
twoway pci Paired-coordinate plot with spikes or lines
twoway pcarrowi Paired-coordinate plot with arrows
twoway scatteri Scatterplot
ztesti z tests (mean-comparison tests, known variance)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The display command is not really an immediate command, but it can be
used to perform as a hand calculator; see [P] display.
power is not technically an immediate command because it does not do
something on typed numbers that another command does on the dataset. It
does, however, work strictly on numbers you type on the command line and
does not disturb the data in memory. power performs power and
sample-size analysis. See power.