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Re: st: _N in by-groups
From
Nick Cox <[email protected]>
To
[email protected]
Subject
Re: st: _N in by-groups
Date
Fri, 19 Aug 2011 09:45:52 +0100
The example makes clear why you made your otherwise very puzzling claim.
There is no contradiction. In your second example,
1. you are running a program for each group of -foreign-
2. that program is in effect just "display the number of observations"
and makes no reference to the -by:- group.
There is dissociation is this second example, but not in the first
example, which behaves as you expect.
The dissociation arises because "_N" is passed as text to the program.
_N is evaluated _within_ the program and not within the context of
-by:-. So _N, as it were, never sees the -by:- and is not influenced
by it. Declaring the program -byable(recall)- makes no difference
here.
It's a subtle example!
Nick
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 8:41 AM, Matthew White
<[email protected]> wrote:
> So if I execute:
> sysuse auto
> bys foreign: drop if _n == _N
> Then two observations are dropped because _N is the number of
> observations in the by-group.
>
> But in this (admittedly silly) example, _N seems to be the number of
> observations in the data set:
> program dispby, byable(recall)
> disp `0'
> end
> sysuse auto
> bys foreign: dispby _N
> Both times 74 is displayed, instead of 52 in the first by-group and 22
> in the second.
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 10:07 AM, Maarten Buis <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 2:21 AM, Matthew White wrote:
>>> If a Stata command has by-groups, it seems like _N is interpreted
>>> sometimes as the number of observations in the by-group and sometimes
>>> as the number of observations in the data set.
>>
>> If you use the -by :- prefix it is always defined as the number of
>> observations within each by-group. Stata would be a pretty lousy
>> program if such a scalar randomly changed meaning...
>>
>> If you want the total number of observations than I would just do:
>>
>> local Ntot = _N
>>
>> or inside a program that previously used -marksample-:
>>
>> count if `touse'
>> local Ntot = r(N)
>>
>> later you do
>>
>> by <somevar> `touse' : <something using _N and `Ntot'> if `touse'
>>
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