Bookmark and Share

Notice: On April 23, 2014, Statalist moved from an email list to a forum, based at statalist.org.


[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: st: restricting margins to significant variables only


From   Richard Williams <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: restricting margins to significant variables only
Date   Fri, 18 Mar 2011 11:18:59 -0500

At 05:23 AM 3/18/2011, Maarten buis wrote:
--- On Fri, 18/3/11, Sunil Kumar wrote:
> I am estimating a logit model with several explanatory
> variables. Only some of these prove to be significant. I
> now want to use the margins command to obtain predicted
> probabilities and/or marginal effects. Is it advisable,
> and if so is there a way, to get margins to base its
> calculations on only those variables which are
> significant?

That is not advisable, see:
<http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/stat/stepwise.html>

Maarten, is that the link you intended? In any event, I agree that it is a bad idea. If you think some effects should be treated as zero, then you should re-estimate the model with those variables excluded. The effects of the remaining variables will likely change, perhaps by quite a bit.

Having said that, you can always have margins fix some variable values at 0. That might make good substantive sense in some cases (e.g. you want to make predictions for a group coded 0) but I don't see why you would want to do so in this case. Indeed, it would be silly to fix a variable at 0 when 0 is not a possible or likely value for the variable.


-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
OFFICE: (574)631-6668, (574)631-6463
HOME:   (574)289-5227
EMAIL:  [email protected]
WWW:    http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam

*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/


© Copyright 1996–2018 StataCorp LLC   |   Terms of use   |   Privacy   |   Contact us   |   Site index