st: Re: Conditional Variable dropping in Stata

[Maarten Buis <maartenlbuis@gmail.com>]

---Ana Gomez Lemmen Meyer wrote me privately:
> I am an economics PhD student. I am trying to do a conditional drop
> of variables in Stata, conditional on the mean of the variable being
> smaller than a certain value. I saw your post about the program you
> implemented for conditional dropping:
>
> http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2007-07/msg00224.html
>
> However, I do not know how to use the function you created. Do you
> have a help menu for this function?

I do not have a help file for that function and I do not intend to
develop that program further. The reason is that I think such problems
are easier solved from first principle.

So in your case you would loop over a list of variables, compute the
mean and drop that variable if that mean is less than some number:

*-------------- begin example ----------------------
sysuse auto, clear

// get a list of variables,
// in this case all numeric variables
// also see -help unab-
// or just type them in a local macro
ds, has(type numeric)
local varl `"`r(varlist)'"'

foreach var of local varl {
	sum `var', meanonly
	if r(mean) < 10 {
		drop `var'
		
		// just to keep a record of which
		// variable got dropped
		local dropped `"`dropped' `var'"'
	}
}

di as text "The following variables have been dropped:"
di as result `"`dropped'"'
*-------------------- end example ------------------------
(For more on examples I sent to the Statalist see:
http://www.maartenbuis.nl/example_faq )

Hope this helps,
Maarten

--------------------------
Maarten L. Buis
Institut fuer Soziologie
Universitaet Tuebingen
Wilhelmstrasse 36
72074 Tuebingen
Germany


http://www.maartenbuis.nl
--------------------------
*
*   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/