Re: st: reverse lookup

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

My short answer is that yes, this is awkward, but you are working with
the most obvious way to do it in Stata. The problem is that in general

... if <condition>

is not guaranteed to identify precisely one observation. It might
yield one, or zero or more than one.

In your case you need == in your code and can use

su rate if period == 1, meanonly
local value = r(min)

The misnamed -meanonly- is quieter and more efficient. If the
condition identifies precisely one observation, then clearly r(min),
r(mean), r(max) will be identical.

The problem is discussed from a different angle in

SJ-6-4  dm0025  . . . . . . . . . .  Stata tip 36: Which observations? Erratum
        . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  N. J. Cox
        Q4/06   SJ 6(4):596                              (no commands)
        correction of example code for Stata tip 36

SJ-6-3  dm0025  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Stata tip 36: Which observations?
        . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  N. J. Cox
        Q3/06   SJ 6(3):430--432                                 (no commands)
        tip for identifying which observations satisfy some
        specified condition

Mata is not surprisingly less awkward here:

: y = 1::10

: x = runiform(10,1)

: x , y
                  1             2
     +-----------------------------+
   1 |  .5044846558             1  |
   2 |  .0174561641             2  |
   3 |   .680281796             3  |
   4 |  .9221656218             4  |
   5 |  .1094441491             5  |
   6 |  .7122591983             6  |
   7 |   .765775156             7  |
   8 |  .0226029507             8  |
   9 |  .9540165765             9  |
  10 |  .2686450339            10  |
     +-----------------------------+

: select(x, y :== 1)
  .5044846558

Nick

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 7:07 PM, Jeph Herrin <stata@spandrel.net> wrote:

> I've just written the same awkward code for the untoldth time, and I'm
> thinking there must be a better way to do it.
>
> The problem is to get a particular value of a variable into a local which
> corresponds to a particular value of another variable. I think this is
> usally call reverse lookup. For example, I might have -period- and -rate-
> and want to store the value of -rate- which corresponds to period = 1. My
> lazy solution is
>
>
>  sum rate if period = 1
>  local rate1 `=r(mean)'
>
> That is, I summarize a single observation, then put the mean in local. Is
> there a better way to do this?
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