Re: st: flagging significant values in a variable

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

This post overlooks earlier solutions posted yesterday. I see no need
to complicate anything by introduction of a tolerance, which seems
based on an idea that the rates are exact decimals to 4 d.p.

Also, the code won't work as intended because it confuses the -if-
command and the -if- qualifier.

FAQ     . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  if command vs. if qualifier
        . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  J. Wernow
        6/00    I have an if command in my program that only seems
                to evaluate the first observation, what's going on?
                http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/lang/ifqualifier.html

Nick

On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Partho Sarkar <partho.ss+lists@gmail.com> wrote:
> Tim,
>
> I am afraid you haven't spelt it out very clearly! Based on one
> possible interpretation, this would be one way to do it (shown only
> for the LCI (renamed lci) variable):
>
> ---------------------------START CODE-------------------------------------------
>
> egen natlci=total(lci*(region==99)) // generates a value for each
> obs., equal to national value)
> local tol .0001  // define tolerance for "significantly lower or higher"
> gen byte tag= .
> if lci-natlci>`tol' {
> replace tag=1
> }
> else if lci-natlci< -`tol' {
> replace tag= 2
> }
> else {
> replace tag = 0
> }
>
> ---------------------------END CODE-------------------------------------------
>
> Hope this helps
>
> Partho
>
>                        From      Tim Evans <Tim.Evans@wmciu.nhs.uk>
>                        To        "'statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu'" <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu>
>                        Subject   st: flagging significant values in a variable
>                        Date      Fri, 2 Mar 2012 09:24:46 +0000
>
>                         Hi,
>
>                        I have a dataset that has variables of rates, LCI and UCI for a
> number of regions in addition to a national average (rate, LCI, UCI)
> so that it looks like this:
>
>                        rate            LCI             UCI             region
>                        0.9727  0.9583  0.9849  1
>                        0.9713  0.9523  0.9867  2
>                        0.9835  0.9667  0.9971  3
>                        0.9790  0.9741  0.9836  99
>
>                        What I would like to do is generate a flag beside each row that
> will flag up entries where they are significantly higher (1) or lower
> (2) or not significantly different (0) to region 99 - I'm unsure as to
> the code here and would appreciate any advice. I'm using Stata 11.2.

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