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st: RE: Graph Bar


From   "Nick Cox" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   st: RE: Graph Bar
Date   Tue, 27 Sep 2005 20:34:21 +0100

Katarina's data are like this: 

. tab year acexist

           |        acexist
      year |         0          1 |     Total
-----------+----------------------+----------
      2000 |        29         26 |        55 
      2001 |        24         61 |        85 
      2002 |        69        134 |       203 
      2003 |        56        152 |       208 
      2004 |        50        160 |       210 
-----------+----------------------+----------
     Total |       228        533 |       761 

-graph bar- won't deliver the reduction she wants, at least not without
some preparation. The reason is a little technical. -graph bar- is based
mainly on a temporary reduction of the data using -collapse-, and
-collapse- doesn't offer that reduction.  (It is nearer the territory of
-contract-, but that is a different story.) 

There are various solutions to the problem. A first solution is to
generate your own percent variable and then plot that directly. Each
percent is, we recall, a numerator divided by a total, multiplied by
100. 

One easy way to get the total is using -egen, total()-. In Stata 8 and
earlier, the function here was -egen, sum()-, not -egen, total()-. 

. egen pc = total(acexist), by(year) 

. egen total = total(1), by(year) 

(what's 1 + 1 + 1 + ... + 1? the total number of observations)

. replace pc = 100 * pc / total 

Stata diehards would scoff at this as namby-pamby and do it with -by:-. 

. bysort year: gen pc = sum(acexist) 

. by year: replace pc = 100 * pc[_N] / _N 

Either way, we can check that we are on the right lines by 

. tabdisp year, cell(pc) 

----------------------
     year |         pc
----------+-----------
     2000 |   47.27273
     2001 |   71.76471
     2002 |   66.00985
     2003 |   73.07692
     2004 |   76.19048
----------------------

Then the graph is a line away: 

. graph bar (mean) pc, over(year) ytitle(percent with audit committee) 
	yla(, ang(h)) 

Or 

. twoway bar pc year, ytitle(percent with audit committee) 
	yla(, ang(h)) barw(0.5) 

Another solution employs a user-written program -catplot- from SSC. You
can install that by 

. ssc install catplot 

-catplot- is just a wrapper for -graph bar- (or -graph hbar- or -graph
dot-). It merely grinds through some reductions not quite trivial
otherwise and then fires up a -graph- command. 

You can get a graph in one line with -catplot- without any prior
calculation, although in practice I get there through a sequence of
small experiments: 

. catplot bar acexist year, percent(year) stack asyvars  yla(, ang(h))  
	yti(percent without and with audit committee) 
	legend(order(1 "without" 2 "with")) 

A graph I like more follows a reversal of coding: 

. gen acexist2 = 1 - acexist

. catplot bar acexist2 year, percent(year) stack asyvars yla(, ang(h)) 
	yti(percent with audit committee) legend(off) bar(2, bcolor(none)) 

The original announcement of -catplot- contains some related comment. 

http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2003-02/msg00608.html

Nick
[email protected] 

Katarina Sikavica (edited, mainly to ASCII from HTML) 

I have just started with Stata graphics and have the following problem
with -graph bar-:

I have a dataset that contains data on the existence of audit committees
-acexist-. In total there are 761 companies, 533 of them having an
audit committee, 228 not. I would like to draw a -graph bar- that shows
the increase in audit committee incidence over -year-.  Drawing a -graph
bar- on the increase in the number of audit committees works fine;
however, as the data from 2000 and 2001 are of poor quality I would like
to have percentages of audit committee incidence over the years
2000-2004 (that is: 47.27% (2000); 71.76% (2001); 66.01% (2002); 73.08%
(2003); 76.19% (2004)). Neither of the following commands leads to the
desired results:

. graph bar (sum) acexist, over (year) percent
. graph bar (sum) acexist, over (year) asyvar percentages


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