Thomas Jacobs <[email protected]> is using Mata to add new variables
to his dataset and having difficulty doing it. Thomas writes
that in Stata, he has variables
Company Number, Trade Day, Input Data1, Input Data 2, etc.
and that he has no difficulty accessing that data in Stata, which he
does by coding
I = st_data(., "var1", "var2", etc.)
He also has no difficulty producing the new variables he wants and ends
up with a new matrix in Mata of the form
Results = (Company Number, Trade Day, Result 1, Result 2, etc.)
where the rows are the observations.
Thomas' difficulty is getting Results back into new Stata variables, and
he writes,
> I have struggled in vain to decipher the mata manual for commands such
> as creating new stata variables from mata (st_addvar), adding
> observations (st_addobs), and modifying or moving values (st_store)
> but have had zero luck in getting anything to work. At this point I
> am thinking I may simply need to write an output file from mata, close
> mata and insheet the output file into stata to append to the dataset
> there.
Writing the data to disk and and merging the results back into the
Stata dataset is certainly one way to proceed, but it will be more
work than just doing what Thomas originally set out to do: copy the
values from Mata matrix Results back into the Stata dataset.
I'll show how, but first I am going to make some assumptions:
1. Thomas didn't say whether the number of observations in the
Stata dataset are the same as the number of rows in Results,
but what he wrote implied it.
2. Thomas didn't say whether the results in the Stata dataset
and the results in Results are in the same order, but I will
assume that they are.
To fix ideas, I will assume that
Results = (Company_Number, Trade_Day, Result1, Result2, Result3)
I will also assume that Company_Number and Trade_day are in the original
dataset. The problem is to add new variables Result1, Result2, and Result3.
I'll give two solutions.
Solution 1: Stata/Mata approach
-------------------------------
At the outset, in Stata, create the three new variables to hold
the results:
. gen Result1 = .
. gen Result2 = .
. gen Result3 = .
Now, back in Mata, after calculations of mata matrix Results, code,
: st_store(., ("Result1", "Result2", "Result3"),
Results[|1,3 \ .,.|] )
Explanation: Matrix Results is N x 5, but the first two variables
(columns) in the matrix already appear in the data, simply want
to add 3, 4, and 5 to the Stata dataset.
There are lots of other ways I could have coded st_store(). Among them:
: st_store(., "Result1", Results[3,.])
: st_store(., "Result2", Results[4,.])
: st_store(., "Result3", Results[5,.])
or
: st_store(., ("Result1", "Result2", "Result3"),
Results[(., (3,4,5)] )
The way I chose, storing Results[|1,3 \ .,.|], says to pull the
submatrix of Results from top-left 1,3 to bottom right number of
rows and number of columns.
Solution 2: Pure approach
-------------------------
The final line of this approach is going to be
: st_store(., ("Result1", "Result2", "Result3"),
Results[|1,3 \ .,.|] )
just as it was in Solution 1. The difference is that, rather than
create the variables in Stata,
. gen Result1 = .
. gen Result2 = .
. gen Result3 = .
I'm going to create them in Mata:
: st_addvar("float", ("Result1", "Result2", "Result3"))
When I do that, the result will look like this:
: st_addvar("float", ("Result1", "Result2", "Result3"))
1 2 3
+-------------+
1 | 3 4 5 |
+-------------+
That's just st_addvar() returning the vector (3,4,5) saying those
are the indices of the new variables created. Actually, rather than
coding
: st_addvar("float", ("Result1", "Result2", "Result3"))
: st_store(., ("Result1", "Result2", "Result3"),
Results[|1,3 \ .,.|] )
I could code
: newvars = st_addvar("float", ("Result1", "Result2", "Result3"))
: st_store(., newvars, Results[|1,3 \ .,.|] )
The second argument of st_store() specifies the Stata variables to
receive the results. That can be specified as a vector of names,
or a vector of variable numbers.
-- Bill
[email protected]
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