Re: st: Fwd: graph/histogram: Can I change the color for each histogram bar/bin separately?

[William Buchanan <william@williambuchanan.net>]

Hi Victor,

I would check out the program -catplot- written by Nick Cox.  You don't necessarily need/want a histogram if there are only 4 possible values; you just want bar graphs where the height of the bars indicate the frequency of each category.  

HTH,
Billy


/* Examples */
clear
set obs 12 // This will be for each year
g year=_n // Years will be from 1-12
expand 1000 // 1000 observations per year
g noise=runiform() // Create noise that can be used to randomly drop observations from the data
g surgery_type = rbinomial(3, .375) // Create the 4 category variable that you mentioned in your email
drop if noise<=.32 // Drop some observations randomly
drop noise //  Drop the variable used to randomly select observations to drop
histogram surgery_type, discrete by(year, total col(12)) // What you originally sent
histogram year, discrete by(surgery_type,  col(4)) frequency // Another way of illustrating things
g cnt=1 // Create a constant that can be used to capture the frequency of events
gr bar (count) cnt, asyvars over(year) by(surgery_type,  col(4))  // Different colors for each year
gr bar (count) cnt, asyvars over(surgery_type) by(year,  col(12))  // Different colors for each surgical type

On Sep 24, 2013, at 11:18 AM, Victor Ciofoaia <vic.ciof@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello everybody!
> 
> I will skip the first thing I desperately burn to say "this is my
> first email to statalist, stata is great! " :)
> 
> I need to do a graph and I managed to make it look nicely as I wanted
> with the by option, getting a 12 years trend:
> 
> .histogram surgery_type, discrete by(year, total col(12))
> 
> The histogram is actually done for just 4 values(1-4), but I would
> like to emphasize how the frequencies changed - a trend in the
> histogram and I could not figure out how to change the color bars in
> histogram. I can change the color for all the bars, but not for the
> 1st bin (ed reg), 2nd bin ( eg blue) etc... Is there a way to do this
> for a histogram?
> 
> I assume I could somehow build a histogram from scratch, but that
> would be too complicated for me at my training point. BTW, is there an
> easy way to make your own histogram from scratch if changing color
> bars does not work?
> 
> Thank you very much for any advice on where to go from here.
> 
> Victor
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