Re: st: RE: tabstatmat - too many literals r(130);

["Ada Ma" <heu034@googlemail.com>]

Hi Nick,

Thanks for the detailed reply. I was trying to calculate K adjustment
for effect coded dummy variables using Kennedy's recommended
adjustment (Rev of Econ and Stat, 1986, pp.174-5).  The weighted
approach is not supported in -xi3- and -devcon- (at least not that I'm
aware of).  Therefore I was fiddling around trying to figure out how
to do it and then I ran into the -tabstat- and your creation
-tabstatmat-.  Now that you have reminded me that extracting the
matrices is perhaps not the best way to go forward, I thought about it
again and decided to use -preserve- calculate the K using sum, etc.,
and restoring the data to run more estimations.

Thanks for your help!
Cheers,
Ada


On 5/18/06, Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk> wrote:
> You are right. -tabstatmat- can trigger this official limit
> of Stata.
>
> But your question exposes what you are doing. You are in
> effect asking -tabstat- to produce 303 matrices (perhaps
> more, depending on details) and then using -tabstatmat- as a
> clean-up program to put them all together again. That asking
> may not be conscious, because the operations are hidden in
> the code. But there should be another way of getting where
> you want to be more directly.
>
> I could, no doubt should, work at -tabstatmat- to see if
> this limit can be overcome. I suspect it can, but in the
> first instance let us see whether there are other tools for
> what you want.
>
> -tabstat- is in essence a tabulation program and an
> excellent one. I use it a lot. However, only rather
> awkwardly does it serve as a data reduction program. A data
> reduction program I define as one that maps some or all of
> your dataset to a new dataset that you want to manipulate in
> turn. -collapse- and -contract- are examples. The main
> reason for saying that about -tabstat- flows from its being
> sufficiently general to produce not just tables that are
> equivalent to matrices, strict sense, but also tables that
> are sets of matrices. So, its returned objects are set up to
> match this generality. It leaves behind a set of matrices.
>
> -tabstatmat- arose as a response to a Statalist question
> from Friedrich Huebler who wanted to put together the
> returned objects.  I posted a program to do it. But it's
> written in the spirit of "If you find yourself in the middle
> of a bog, here is a way out." Other advice might be "Don't
> wander into the middle of a bog. Keep to dry ground!" I use
> -tabstatmat- myself largely when I am fixing its bugs that
> users have found.
>
> More prosaically, and more generally:
>
> You want a matrix. Why? Is it because you want do something
> with it that depends on it being a matrix, such as adding it
> to another matrix, or getting some eigenvalues? Or is the
> matrix just a means to an end, such as exporting a reduced
> dataset to other software?
>
> If you want a matrix of descriptive statistics, qua matrix,
> there are plenty of other programs designed to do that
> directly. One example is -statsmat- from SSC.
>
> If you want an output dataset, or an output table, then
> again there are better programs for that, such as
> -collapse-, -contract-, -tabout- from SSC or even
> -tabexport- from SSC.
>
> More advice depends on more details.
>
> Nick
> n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk
>
> Ada Ma
>
> > Hello Statalist (and Nick Cox in particular being the author
> > of tabstatmat),
> >
> > I tried to save the results of tabstat in a matrix using tabstatmat.
> > However it seems like the table I made got too many rows (303 in my
> > case), and I ran into the too many parantheses error (255 is the max
> > according to the error code).
> >
> > What would you recommend me to do in this case?  I think I can do the
> > tabstat by the 100's, and then stack the matrices.  Is there any thing
> > else you'd recommend?
>
> *
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--
Ada Ma
Research Fellow
Health Economics Research Unit
University of Aberdeen, UK.
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/heru/
Tel: +44 (0) 1224 553863
Fax: +44 (0) 1224 550926

*
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