RE: st: modifying added line length and location / modifying direction of jitter

[Juan Solon <juan.solon@lshtm.ac.uk>]

Svend,
Thank you very much for pointing out dotplot which was there all along.

dotplot price, by(foreign) center median msymbol(oh)

gives me what I wanted, except that I do not have limited control over 
the line denoting the average.
The symbol denoting the average can be controlled through msymbol as 
the second on the list, if the bar option is not used.  This limits 
what you can use to what is in the symbolstyle list.  I know that what 
is on the list is enough for most needs, but I was wondering if there 
is a way to add a customised symbol to the symbolstyle list?

Since I wanted a dashed line:

I have used dotplot with the added text option to place a dashed line 
at the median - although the length of the dash is just a question of 
trial and error.

sysuse auto, clear
qui sum price if foreign==0, detail
local 0=r(p50)
qui sum price if foreign==1, detail
local 1=r(p50)

dotplot price, by(foreign) center median ///
msymbol(oh)  ///
text("`0'" 0 "-------------")  text("`1'" 1 "-------------")

Thanks you again for pointing me in the right direction.

Juan

From Svend

Juan want to plot a continuous variable against
a categorical variable, including the medians.

I think [R] dotplot is what you need. Please note
that it is in the reference manual and is different
from [G] graph twoway dot.

Hope this helps.

Svend

From Juan

 Instead of using  - gr box - in stata, I wanted to use stata's scatter
plot to produce a graph plotting a continuous variable against a
categorical variable, mainly because this is how this particular
laboratory assay is commonly presented.

I am using Stata version 8.2 on a MacOSX.  Using the commands below:

sysuse auto, clear
scatter price foreign, jitter(20) msymbol(Oh) xlabel(0 1, valuelabel)
///
yline(4782, noextend) yline(5759, noextend) ///
xscale(noline) ///
xline(0 1, lpattern(dash)) ///
plotr(m(l=15 r=15))

I end up with a graph with :
1)  y  lines (which represent the median for each category) that are
too long for what I want - I would want to specify length and location
of the y- line along the x axis -

How do I adjust the length of the added line to cover only the category
of interest ? I couldn't find any suboption in linestyle or added
linestyle.

2)  data points which appear to jitter to the right (for Domestic) or
to the left  (for Foreign) of the tick label, so the scatter points end
up havign a visual left or right margin.

Is it possible to have the jittering occur randomly to the left or
right of a vertical reference line?

Is there another way of doing this type of graph without using
scatter?

Thanks,
Juan

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