Re: st: How to reference results from a big dataset within a program

[Richard Williams <richardwilliams.ndu@gmail.com>]

I think you could tell people that simudata must be placed somewhere 
along Stata's adopath. Then the program could say -sysuse simudata-. 
My guess is that simudata.dta would have to be specified as an 
ancillary file in the installation package, which means that the user 
will have to do a little more work than usual to get the package installed.

Alternatively, how were the simulations done? If with drawnorm or 
something like that maybe you could include code that would recreate the data.


At 04:25 PM 8/27/2013, Chen,Minxing wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I submitted a manuscript and program to Stat Journal several months 
> ago, and now got feedback from reviewer. I need a big help from your 
> all regarding how to reference a big dataset within a program.
>
> Basically, in the program I submitted, I had to reference results 
> from a big pre-simulated dataset (four variables, but around 400,000 
> observations). In my previous submission, I simply submitted the 
> pre-simulated dataset with my program, and within the program I 
> called up that simulated dataset by using code such as " use 
> c:\ado\personal\simudata". I was hoping when people download the 
> program from SSC, the pre-simulated dataset will be also downloaded 
> to the directory "c:\ado\personal\".
>
> Now my reviewer indicated that I can't expect users to do that, I 
> can't even tell the user to place the file there because such a 
> directory may not be creatable for the user (e.g. they might not 
> have a C: drive). The reviewer suggested me to find some other way 
> to get the information in my pre-simulated dataset, such as 
> incorporating the data into the program.
>
> I tried to copy of the simulated data within my program by using 
> syntax such as "input x y z k", however, since there are so many 
> observations (a little more than 400,000), and there are system 
> limit for the maximum lines of syntax within a program (around 
> 3500), I was not able to do this way. The reviewer also mentioned 
> that I may use "Mata library" function, but I am pretty new to Stata 
> Mata. Is there anyone that may be able to help regarding this issue?
>
> Thank you so much!
> Minxing Chen
>
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-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
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