Re: st: linear interpolation

[Rafal Raciborski <rafal.raciborski@emory.edu>]

scott,

i think i overdid my example.  in your case the following should work:

tsset (your vars)
tsfill, full

and if you want to extrapolate to 2005, simply type -edit-, add only 
one observation (2005 for the year variable) and repeat as above.

--
anyway, to show you the underlying logic of my previous post, let's say 
you have 5,000 obs total and you need to add 18 new observations to 
each group identified by state and year.  the "manual" way is to type 
-edit-, go to the very end of your dataset and add the years that you 
want, e.g. 1981, 1982, ..., 1989, 1991, 1992, ..., 1999, then -tsset- 
the data and use -tsfill, full-.  this works well when you have only 
few observations to add (as in your case).

my original answer was better suited to adding a large number of years 
to each group.  instead of the "manual" editing, you add a "fake" panel 
with all the years you want to use (e.g. 1980-2000 or 21 years total) 
by executing

count
local N = `r(N)' + 21
set obs `N'

now you will have 5,021 obs, and you want to replace observation 5,001 
with 1980, 5,002 with 1981, ..., 5,021 with 2000.  so in this articular 
case, you have to use

replace year = -3021 + _n if year==.

and then to -tsset- and -tsfill, full-.

but again, as i have just discovered, stata expands the in-between 
years automatically so there's no need to follow either of the long 
approaches.

rafal


================
Rafal Raciborski
Graduate student
Department of Political Science
Emory University
301 Tarbutton Hall
1555 Dickey Drive Atlanta, GA 30322
404-315-7498 (home)
rafal.raciborski@emory.edu
http://www.roofoos.net/


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