I appreciate the responses that I received so far but realize that my
initial message was not precise enough.
The variable mlineno lists the line number of a household member's
mother. In household 1 in my example data, household member 2 is the
mother of household member 3. In household 2, 1 is the mother of 2,
and 3 is the mother of 4 and 5. I would like to create a variable
that lists the age of each household member's mother. The result
should look like this:
hhid lineno age mlineno mage
1 1 32 . .
1 2 30 . .
1 3 5 2 30
2 1 68 . .
2 2 41 1 68
2 3 40 . .
2 4 17 3 40
2 5 14 3 40
The loop that I am using to create the variable mage works perfectly
but it is very slow with a large number of observations.
Friedrich
--- Friedrich Huebler <[email protected]> wrote:
> I am looking for advice to speed up a loop. The loop determines
> characteristics of other household members in household survey data
> and is taken from this Stata FAQ:
>
> http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/data/members.html
>
> The data has the variables hhid (household ID), lineno (line number
> of household member), age, and mlineno (mother's line number).
>
> hhid lineno age mlineno
> 1 1 32 .
> 1 2 30 .
> 1 3 5 2
> 2 1 68 .
> 2 2 41 1
> 2 3 40 .
> 2 4 17 3
> 2 5 14 3
>
> The following code creates the variable mage with the mother's age.
>
> gen byte mage=.
> sum lineno, meanonly
> forvalues i = 1/`r(max)' {
> gen byte tag = 1 if lineno==`i'
> bysort hhid: egen byte iage = max(tag*age)
> replace mage=iage if mlineno==`i'
> drop tag iage
> }
>
> I tried changing -bysort hhid- to -by hhid- but the time needed for
> the loop is the same. Running the loop -quietly- also makes no
> difference. Can anything be done to make this loop go faster?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Friedrich Huebler
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