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Re: st: RE: Taking averages, etc.


From   Richard Williams <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: RE: Taking averages, etc.
Date   Wed, 17 Dec 2003 14:18:09 -0500

At 01:24 PM 12/17/2003 -0500, David Kantor wrote:
I have written about this previously, but I feel compelled to state this again. Some of us may find it confusing, but I always do these kinds of operations using nested cond() functions:

#delimit ;
gen Y =
cond(X1 == 1 & X2 == 3, 3,
cond(X3 == 2 & X4 == 17, 4,
5));
I like this! It seems to do exactly what I had in mind in terms of being a counterpart to the SPSS DO IF command. I believe it is also very similar to how you would do this in Excel if you were trying to fit the formula into a cell instead of writing a macro. My only objection, as you also note, is that this syntax is harder to read than the SPSS counterpart, but splitting things up onto separate lines probably helps.


As Fred wrote:

gen y = 3 if X1==1 & X2==3
replace y = 4 if X1 !=1 & X2 !=3 & X3==2 & X4==17
replace y = 5 if X1 !=1 & X2 !=3 & X3 !=2 & X4 !=17

First, this needs a correction:
Actually, I made the mistake, not Fred :) But I think this underscores that it would be easy (at least for somebody like me) to make coding mistakes if there were a lot of conditions involved.


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