Statistical Software

From the last post in this series, you should know how to change between numeric types and easily change numeric data.  We’ll now expand your type-changing skills to include changing string variables with two new commands.   (more…)

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From our last posts in this series, you should be comfortable with how Stata handles data editing, as well as with making your own variables. In this post, we’ll talk about commands that edit the content or storage type of your variables in Stata: recode and recast. Let’s start off with the recode command.

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From our last article, you should feel comfortable with the idea of editing and saving data sets in Stata. In this article, we’ll explain how to create new variables in Stata using replace, generate, egen, and clonevar.

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Stata makes it a breeze to edit or clean your data. If you’re unfamiliar with using data sets in Stata, check out these blog posts to get a good grasp on importing and browsing data in Stata.

For this tutorial we will be using Stata’s “auto” data set. If you haven’t loaded it in yet, type

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Once you’ve imported your data into Stata the next step is usually examining it.

Before you work on building a model or running any tests, you need to understand your data. Ask yourself these questions:

• Is every variable marked as the appropriate type?
• Are missing observations coded consistently and marked as missing?
• Do I want to exclude any variables or data points?

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SPSS has a nice little feature for adding and averaging variables with missing data that many people don’t know about.

It allows you to add or average variables that have some missing data, while specifying how many are allowed to be missing. (more…)

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