dear nick cox and others:
I have just tried to do as suggested in your e-mail below; that is, since I am using stata 8 I typed:
egen pc = sum(acexist), by (year)
egen total = sum(1), by(year)
replace pc = 100 * pc / total
I have also tried:
bysort year: gen pc = sum(acexist)
bysort year: replace pc = 100 * pc[_N] / _N
.... but unfortunately I get twice the same wrong results:
tabdisp year, cell(pc) shows:
year pc
2000 12,09302
2001 28,50467
2002 62.61682
2003 71.02804
2004 74.4186
am I doing something wrong??? help!!
cheers,
katy
"Nick Cox" <[email protected]>
Katarina's data are like this:
. tab year acexist
| acexist
year | 0 1 | Total
-----------+----------------------+----------
2000 | 29 26 | 55
2001 | 24 61 | 85
2002 | 69 134 | 203
2003 | 56 152 | 208
2004 | 50 160 | 210
-----------+----------------------+----------
Total | 228 533 | 761
-graph bar- won't deliver the reduction she wants, at least not without
some preparation. The reason is a little technical. -graph bar- is based
mainly on a temporary reduction of the data using -collapse-, and
-collapse- doesn't offer that reduction. (It is nearer the territory of
-contract-, but that is a different story.)
There are various solutions to the problem. A first solution is to
generate your own percent variable and then plot that directly. Each
percent is, we recall, a numerator divided by a total, multiplied by
100.
One easy way to get the total is using -egen, total()-. In Stata 8 and
earlier, the function here was -egen, sum()-, not -egen, total()-.
. egen pc = total(acexist), by(year)
. egen total = total(1), by(year)
(what's 1 + 1 + 1 + ... + 1? the total number of observations)
. replace pc = 100 * pc / total
Stata diehards would scoff at this as namby-pamby and do it with -by:-.
. bysort year: gen pc = sum(acexist)
. by year: replace pc = 100 * pc[_N] / _N
Either way, we can check that we are on the right lines by
. tabdisp year, cell(pc)
----------------------
year | pc
----------+-----------
2000 | 47.27273
2001 | 71.76471
2002 | 66.00985
2003 | 73.07692
2004 | 76.19048
----------------------
Then the graph is a line away:
. graph bar (mean) pc, over(year) ytitle(percent with audit committee)
yla(, ang(h))
Or
. twoway bar pc year, ytitle(percent with audit committee)
yla(, ang(h)) barw(0.5)
Another solution employs a user-written program -catplot- from SSC. You
can install that by
. ssc install catplot
-catplot- is just a wrapper for -graph bar- (or -graph hbar- or -graph
dot-). It merely grinds through some reductions not quite trivial
otherwise and then fires up a -graph- command.
You can get a graph in one line with -catplot- without any prior
calculation, although in practice I get there through a sequence of
small experiments:
. catplot bar acexist year, percent(year) stack asyvars yla(, ang(h))
yti(percent without and with audit committee)
legend(order(1 "without" 2 "with"))
A graph I like more follows a reversal of coding:
. gen acexist2 = 1 - acexist
. catplot bar acexist2 year, percent(year) stack asyvars yla(, ang(h))
yti(percent with audit committee) legend(off) bar(2, bcolor(none))
The original announcement of -catplot- contains some related comment.
http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2003-02/msg00608.html
Nick
[email protected]
Katarina Sikavica (edited, mainly to ASCII from HTML)
I have just started with Stata graphics and have the following problem
with -graph bar-:
I have a dataset that contains data on the existence of audit committees
-acexist-. In total there are 761 companies, 533 of them having an
audit committee, 228 not. I would like to draw a -graph bar- that shows
the increase in audit committee incidence over -year-. Drawing a -graph
bar- on the increase in the number of audit committees works fine;
however, as the data from 2000 and 2001 are of poor quality I would like
to have percentages of audit committee incidence over the years
2000-2004 (that is: 47.27% (2000); 71.76% (2001); 66.01% (2002); 73.08%
(2003); 76.19% (2004)). Neither of the following commands leads to the
desired results:
. graph bar (sum) acexist, over (year) percent
. graph bar (sum) acexist, over (year) asyvar percentages
*
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* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
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