Dear Toyoto,
The auto data has 22 observations with foreign=1, not 50950. In [R]
tabstat we read: "aweights and fweights are allowed; see [U] 14.1.6
weight." [U] 14.1.6 states that most Stata commands rescale the
aweights to sum to N. However, -tabstat- does not rescale the
weights. The fact that -tabstat- treats aweights the same way as
fweights is not clearly documented. One could also argue that this
behavior is inconsistent.
Friedrich Huebler
--- Toyoto Iwata <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear Friedrich Huebler
>
> You wrote about
>
> > . tabstat foreign [aw=weight], stat(sum)
> >
> > variable | sum
> > -------------+----------
> > foreign | 50950
> > ------------------------
>
> Perhaps I miss the point, but,
>
> .gen eachmean = foreign*weight
>
> .gen sumeachmean = sum(eachmean) /* I don't know the mean of this.
> */
>
> . list sumeachmean in l
>
> +----------+
> | sumeac~n |
> |----------|
> 74. | 50950 |
> +----------+
>
> This seems to agree with the definition of the aweight.
>
> [Online help says,]
>
> aweights, or analytic weights, are weights that are inversely
> proportional to the variance of an observation; i.e.,
> the variance of the j-th observation is assumed to be sigma^2/w_j,
> where w_j are the weights.
> Typically, the observations represent averages and the weights are
> the number of elements that gave rise to the average.
>
>
> > The Stata User's Guide states in section 14.1.6: "For most Stata
> > commands, the recorded scale of aweights is irrelevant; Stata
> > internally rescales them to sum to N, the number of observations
> in
> > your data, when it uses them." It would be useful if the Stata
> > documentation could make clear which commands don't use aweights
> in this manner.
> >
> > Friedrich Huebler
>
> sincerely,
>
> Toyoto
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