Hate to disagree with Nick, but Stata is well-designed for intelligent graph editing. Timothy maybe needs to fiddle with a few alternatives and work out what would show what he intends. A log scale is one option but has many other implications.
For example, it's straightforward in Stata to draw lines with/without outliers. Other "point'n'click" packages don't make this easy, so suppress the desire.
fit y x
predict yhat1
fit y x if y<1000
predict yhat2
scatter y yhat1 yhat2 x if y<1000, connect(. l l) msym(o i i) sort
Another simple trick is to copy one variable into several, so subsets can be distinguished on the plot. You could automate this (eg, using egen to save the max value of x), but I'd usually do it as part of visual editing, for example to add text labels to the points at the end of each line. It's therefore feasible to draw a line for the data excluding the outlier, and add a second line in different style pointing up with a label at its end describing the outlier.
This is the type of work where I'd draft commands in a DO file so they are easily modified and re-run.
A
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Nick Cox
Sent: 30 October 2005 16:40
To: [email protected]
Subject: st: RE: truncating graph range
What you want is _not_ straightforward. I know no easy and also
general way of omitting a data point from a Stata graph and also
having it exert some offstage influence on the remainder of the graph.
In my experience, when people think they want something like
this using a logarithmic scale for the variable concerned is usually the
best way forward.
Nick
[email protected]
Timothy Dang
> I'm making a lot of (line) plots in Stata, and mostly it's working
> great, but I've hit a snag. For a few of my data sets, there are some
> data points which are extraordinarily high. With the automatically
> scaled axis ranges, these points are visible, but all the detail of
> the rest of the data is shrunk to invisibility.
>
> So, I want to:
> (a) enforce a maximum for the axis, hopefully showing the lines going
> up towards some point not shown on the plot, and
> (b) add some text describing what happens at those points (I can do
> this outside Stata if needed).
>
> Hopefully this is straightforward and I've just missed something.
> Thanks for any pointers.
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