RE: st: Quintiles

[Leonardo Jaime Gonzalez Allende <leonardo.gonzalez@ine.cl>]

Yes, Maarten, you are right, sorry for writing you directly.

I don't was planning to cut a person or household in many parts. The question was about a possible adjustment to the weight factor, if the observation of the sample is the cut point of the quintile. 

If I sort the households of a sample by their incomes, a household "x" could represents 300 households but the accumulated frequency of the population is e.g. 20,02%.

My question was if there is an efficient way (command) to repeat the observation and adjust weight factor as follow:

the same household "xa" now represents 280 households and now the accumulated frequency of the population is e.g. 20% (exactly) (leaving to the first quintile).

the same household "xb" (the other part) represents 20 households accumulating a frequency of 20,02% of the population (changing to the second quintile this part). 

Regards, 

Leonardo

-----Mensaje original-----
De: Maarten Buis [mailto:maartenlbuis@gmail.com] 
Enviado el: Miércoles, 08 de Agosto de 2012 12:41
Para: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Asunto: Re: st: Quintiles

--- Leonardo Jaime Gonzalez Allende asked:
>>> I'm trying to divide a sample of households (expanded)
>>> into quintiles using the xtile command. I want to create
>>> 5 groups with the exactly same quantity of population,
>>> but using the xtitle command, the quantity of households
>>> in each quintil is very slightly different to 20% when the
>>> number of observations isn't exactly dividable by 5.
>>> Do you know any command to divide the population
>>> (sample expanded) into 5 groups of exactly same weight?

--- I answered:
>> That is logically impossible.

-- Leonardo Jaime Gonzalez Allende wrote me privately:
> sorry for write you directly, but I like to know, why is
> logically impossible separate the population (by
> incomes) in 5 groups of the same weith?

Don't sent such follow-up questions privately. If you find my answer
puzzling, than chances are that someone else who is following this
discussion finds that too. This is explained in the Statalist FAQ.

Think of it this way: How can you divide 6 persons in 5 equally sized
groups? You could assign one person to each group, and than you are
left with one person. If you could split the remaining 1 person up
into 5 1/5th persons, than we could create 5 equally sized groups.
However, that is impossible (or rather bloody, if we take that too
literally). So given the inherently discrete nature of the number of
observations you cannot divide your data up into 5 groups of exactly
the same size if the number of observations in not dividable by 5.

-- Maarten

---------------------------------
Maarten L. Buis
WZB
Reichpietschufer 50
10785 Berlin
Germany

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

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