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Re: st: loop thru unique values of a variable


From   Philip Ryan <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: loop thru unique values of a variable
Date   Sat, 07 Sep 2002 12:11:55 +0930

bysort D: <stata command>

This construct in Stata often solves problems that other programs require looping structures to address.


As an aside, -inspect- is not a good choice for finding the number of unique values of a variable. It only reports up to 99 unique values, after which r(N_unique) is set to missing. -tabulate- is theoretically good for up to 3000 unique values [see r(r) after a -return list- ]. There was a thread on the list some time ago about what to do when the number of unique values was greater than 3000; the archives would have this. I suspect some looping would be involved.

Phil


At 05:32 PM 6/09/2002 -0700, you wrote:

Hi all !

I am trying to loop through all unique values of a variable.

For example if the data set contains 9 observations and the variable of interest is D which takes the values 0 0 0 2 2 2 4 4 4
I would like to loop through the unique values 0 2 4 .

Below is a terrible "fix" which makes the additional assumption that the unique values are evenly spaced. ( I prefer not to make that assumption). It basically extracts the number of unique values from *inspect*, finds the minimum value through *summarize* and then constructs the loop from scratch .

quietly inspect D
local nu=r(N_unique)
quietly sum D
local dmin = r(min)
local last = `nu' * `dmin'

forvalues d= `dmin'(`dmin') `last' {
...
}

Is there a better way to do that in stata or is that just not what stata was built for ?

Thanks for any suggestions ,

Matt

--
Matt Schonlau
310-393-0411 x7682
http://www.rand.org/methodology/stat/members/matt/


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Philip Ryan
Associate Professor and Head,
Department of Public Health
Medical School
University of Adelaide
Adelaide 5005
South Australia

tel: +61 8  83033570
fax: +61 8 82234075

[email protected]

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