victor michael zammit
> What I am trying to do here,is to take any normally
> distributed variable
> ,that is to say ,with any mean and standard deviation ,and
> disect it into 50
> equal intervals (bins) ,and then compare the two
> distributions.I would
> appreciate any comments on how this could be done differently :
>
> capture program drop bins
> program define bins
< code >
You are using some version of Stata <= 7.
Your program generates a normal with
10,000 observations and then draws a
histogram using -graph- and a frequency
polygon.
You could make your program less noisy
by slapping
quietly {
}
around the calculations. Apart from that,
I don't know what to say as I don't really
understand what you want to do which is not
already supported.
What two distributions do you want to
compare?
If the problem is to compare a
variable with a reference normal, there
are at least two ways to do it graphically
in Stata <= 8.
1. -graph, histogram normal-
2. -qnorm-
In my experience the second is much more
effective at respecting coarse and fine
structure. The binning of the histogram
inevitably loses information.
If you seek a histogram with more than
50 bins, -histplot- on SSC might serve
(but that is _no_ interest to Stata 8
users).
Nick
[email protected]
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