st: RE: By with forvalues

[Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

forval k = 10/20 {
	egen price`k' = mean(price / (product == `k')), by(time)
} 

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

Jorge Alé Chilet

I am working with a panel data. The relevant variables are date, product number and price. I want to create new variables, say, price of products number 10 to 20. For every day, this variable would have the same value across all products.
A way of doing this would be:

forvalues k = 10/20 {  
  forvalues time = 2392/2547 {
     sum price if mydate==`time' & product==`k', meanonly 
     quietly replace price`k'=r(mean) if mydate==`time'
}
}

The problem is that this takes a long time (huge dataset, many products). Can you think of a faster way of doing this? A possible solution would be to run the loop for every day, but this would imply doing something like this, 

by mydate: forvalues k = 10/20 {  
                     sum price if product==`k', meanonly 
                     replace price`k'=r(mean)
}

which is forbidden since forvalues cannot be combined with by.


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