st: Finding duplicate values across different variables

[Michael Goodwin <michael.goodwin@endeavor.org>]

I have a social network dataset consisting of two ID variables (source and
target) and a number of indicators (ind1, ind2, ind3). The data looks like
this:

source            target            ind1   ind2   ind3
company1      company2      1       0       0
company3      company5      0       1       0
company2      company1      1       1       0
company5      company3      1       1       1

My goal is to 1) consolidate any observations where the combination of
source and target is equal (even where they aren't duplicates in the
traditional Stata sense, such as observations 1 and 3 or 2 and 4 above);
and 2) make the source and target of the consolidated observation equal to
the source and target of whichever observation had a higher rowtotal of the
indicators (so observations 3 and 4 would remain).

Thus far, my approach has been to create a concatenation of source and
target and, in a loop, flag all instances where
source+target==target+source elsewhere in the dataset.

gen orig = source+target;
gen new = target+source;
gen temp = .;
local max = _N;
egen count = rowtotal(ind*);
forv num = 1/`max' {;
replace temp = 1 if orig==new[`num'];
};

I still haven't been able to figure out how to sort the resulting dataset
in such a way that I can easily consolidate the observations based on the
count variable. Any thoughts you have would be much appreciated. Thanks in
advance.

Best,

Mike
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