st: RE: programatically dropping variables that don't actually vary

["Sarah Edgington" <sedging@ucla.edu>]

Jenn,
There are a variety of ways you might want to do this.  What I would do is
something like the following:

foreach var of varlist dummy1-dummyn {
	sum `var',  meanonly
	if r(mean)==0 {
		drop `var'
	}	
}

This cycles through each of your variables (substitute your actual variable
list for "dummy1-dummyn").  For reach variable it calculates the mean.  The
drop statement in the if loop only gets executed if the value stored in
r(mean) is 0.

-Sarah


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
[mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Earl, Jennifer
Suzanne - (jenniferearl)
Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2012 11:46 AM
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: st: programatically dropping variables that don't actually vary 

Hi,

I am working with a large number of dummy variables and using collapse to
create derivative datasets that are the frequencies of 1's for each dummy
variable (a couple of hundred through foreach loops). I want to drop any of
the dummy variables that never had a 1 (so mean(dummy1)==0, or
max(dummy)==0) but it seems that drop only lets you use an if statement to
drop observations, but not an if statement to drop variables.  

My best guess is to use a list means to create a list of the variable names
that can be stored in a local and then fed into a drop command, but can't
seem to make that work either since I only want the list of variable names
that have a mean of 0. Or maybe transpose the dataset, drop then since the
variables are now observations, and transpose back? Another solution would
be save through StatTansfer and use it's drop constants feature, and then
bring the data back in, but there must be an easier way. 

Any ideas?

Cheers,

Jenn

***********************************
Jennifer Earl
Professor of Sociology
Social Sciences 421
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721-0027

Phone: (520) 621-3296
***********************************


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