Re: st: Stata 13 wishlist

[William Buchanan <william@williambuchanan.net>]

I just remembered a few things that I've been wondering about for a while:

1. Adding a suppression option to graph commands for labels. For example, I often need to generate bar graphs with bar heights labeled but think it'd be nice if I could selectively suppress 0 values; the graphs aren't my choice, but this is one way I think I could make the graphs even cleaner. 

2. Additional control over placement of individual value labels. When graphing frequencies of categorical values, it'd be nice if there were a way to use something like jittering to displace value labels when they completely or partially overlap to improve clarity. 

3. I mentioned it previously, but I think adding some good documentation on Stata's graphics engine could easily solve many of the issues, since there would probably be more than a few people interested in developing their own graphs and/or adding features to existing graphic classes.

Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 3, 2013, at 6:20, Stas Kolenikov <skolenik@gmail.com> wrote:

> Stata is freaking powerful in instrumental variable models, a far cry
> for any mainstream latent variable package. With a little twist and a
> couple dozen lines of code, you have a whole new arsenal of techniques
> fully supported by GMM, which in turn treats anything that has a
> quadratic objective function. So I am sure that with some -gmm-
> witchcraft, the analogue of Mplus' WLSMV can be coded in Stata. If
> that's the diagonally weighted least squares (I've never been very
> good at idiosyncratic Mplus abbreviations), then it is -gmm,
> wmatrix(robust, independent)- when the covariance entries are given to
> -gmm- as moments... and then -gmm- would offer more, like -cluster-
> corrections and iterated GMM, to mention a couple. As far as I
> understand, Stata's -sem, method(adf)- is implemented internally via a
> -gmm- call. Moreover, a lot of ordinal response functionality can come
> from the wonderful David Roodman's -cmp-. So if you are desperate to
> do ordinal SEM in Stata, you'll find ways :).
> 
> On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 10:29 AM, John Antonakis <John.Antonakis@unil.ch> wrote:
>> Hi Billy:
>> 
>> Right...here is the post:
>> 
>> http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2012-08/msg01453.html
>> 
>> Still, ADF doesn't have all the advantages that what WLSMV (i.e., Muthén's
>> robust WLS) does.
>> 
>> Best,
>> 
>> J.
>> 
>> __________________________________________
>> 
>> Prof. John Antonakis
>> Faculty of Business and Economics
>> Department of Organizational Behavior
>> University of Lausanne
>> Internef #618
>> CH-1015 Lausanne-Dorigny
>> Switzerland
>> Tel ++41 (0)21 692-3438
>> Fax ++41 (0)21 692-3305
>> http://www.hec.unil.ch/people/jantonakis
>> 
>> Associate Editor
>> The Leadership Quarterly
>> __________________________________________
>> 
>> On 02.01.2013 17:21, William Buchanan wrote:
>>> 
>>> It's been requested several times previously, but including some capacity
>>> to control the transparency in graphs (e.g., an option for alpha blending).
>>> Adding some documentation to help end-users develop new graph commands more
>>> easily would also be incredibly helpful (Sergey R. presented on this topic
>>> and the Beamer slides can be found easily via google).
>>> 
>>> Re: John,
>>> I'm not in the best Internet browsing situation at the moment, but I had
>>> read a post where either Cameron McIntosh or Stas Kolenikov suggested that
>>> the ADF estimator is equivalent to the WLS estimator in Mplus.
>>> 
>>> If nothing else I think speeding up some of the -xt- commands would be
>>> pretty awesome (e.g., xtmelogit, xtmepoisson, etc...). Another previously
>>> mentioned suggestion was to help make it easier for users to integrate Stata
>>> with other scripting and/or programming languages (i.e., python).
>>> 
>>> Since the documentation is prepared in LaTeX, maybe an electronic copy in
>>> a format other than PDF would be helpful as well.
>>> 
>>> Just my $ 0.02,
>>> Billy
>>> 
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>> 
>>> On Jan 2, 2013, at 7:53, Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Postings on this point seem to be overlooking the Graph Recorder.
>>>> 
>>>> Nick
>>>> 
>>>> On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 3:44 PM, John Antonakis <John.Antonakis@unil.ch>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> I second that suggestion:
>>>>> 
>>>>> "to show commands and syntaxes in the results window". Oftentimes, it is
>>>>> hard to figure out the syntax when making minor edits to a graph....it
>>>>> would
>>>>> be so helpful if we could see the syntax that makes the change.
>>>> 
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>> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> -- Stas Kolenikov, PhD, PStat (SSC)  ::  http://stas.kolenikov.name
> -- Senior Survey Statistician, Abt SRBI  ::  work email kolenikovs at
> srbi dot com
> -- Opinions stated in this email are mine only, and do not reflect the
> position of my employer
> 
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