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Re: st: Dataset of means from the three largest values of a group
From 
 
Nick Cox <[email protected]> 
To 
 
[email protected] 
Subject 
 
Re: st: Dataset of means from the three largest values of a group 
Date 
 
Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:25:21 +0000 
I assume no missing values for -trade-. "3" here evidently means here "up to 3"
bysort country year (trade)  :  gen tag  = (_N - _n) < 3
by country year : egen meanhighest = mean(trade / tag)
On why division by zero can be useful, see
SJ-11-2 dm0055  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Speaking Stata: Compared with ...
        . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  N. J. Cox
        Q2/11   SJ 11(2):305--314                                (no commands)
        reviews techniques for relating values to values in other
        observations
The second highest (silver medallist) is more robust-resistant to outliers:
bysort country year (trade) : gen silver = trade[_N-1]
Nick
On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 8:03 PM, Iulian Ihnatov <[email protected]> wrote:
> I have the following dataset for the period of 1999 to 2010:
> country    year     partner     trade
> AFG          1999    USA          12345
> AFG          1999    DEU          9875
> AFG          1999    FRA           25487
> ........................
> AFG          2000    USA           5454
> AFG          2000    HUN          5454
> ........................
> HUN         1999    DEU           58744
> ........................
>
> I need to create a dataset of means of the "trade" variable, grouped by
> country and year, but only for the three largest observations of each group.
> I may use - collapse (mean) trade, by(country year) -, but I don't know how
> to isolate the largest three values from each group (in some years, there
> are only 1 or 2 observations available, in others more than 10). Any help
> would be highly appreciated.
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