NetCourse 151
Introduction to STATA Programming
Content:
An introduction to Stata programming dealing with what most statistical software users mean by programming, namely, the careful performance of reproducible analyses.
Through a combination of lectures, example applications, and carefully chosen problems, the course addresses the full range of methods and techniques necessary to be most productive in the Stata environment.
Course Lecturer:
Bill Gould, President of StataCorp and Head of Development.
Course Leaders:
Theresa Boswell, technical services representative at StataCorp
Kevin Crow, technical services analyst at StataCorp
Kerry Kammire, technical services representative at StataCorp
Course Dates:
September 12 - October 24, 2008
Cost:
£ 77 + VAT
Prerequisites:
- Stata 10, installed and working
- Basic knowledge of using Stata interactively
- Internet web browser, such as Netscape, Microsoft Internet Explorer, or Mozilla, installed and working (course is platform independent)
Lecture 1: Organization of analysis
- Mechanics of using do-files, ado-files, and program define
- Programming as automating data-management and analysis
- Organization of multiple do-files
- Ensuring reproducibility
- Data verification (assert)
- Debugging (trace)
- Working with datasets too large to fit in memory
- Indexing (subscripting) observations
- assert as an alternative to branching
- Reading and processing relational datasets
- Consuming calculated results
Lecture 2: Macros, arguments, and looping
- Using macros to contain strings
- Using macros to contain numbers
- Using macros to pass and receive arguments with do-files
- Using macros to pass and receive arguments with programs
- Distinction between local and global macros
- Branching and looping
- Program style
- Shifting over lists
- Looping across observations
- Application: Listing data neatly (report writing and use of display)
There is an additional one-week break between Lectures 2 and 3 in this course because we have found the extra time is necessary for discussion.
Lecture 3: Examples and applications
- Do-files, ado-files, and programs: when to use which
- Complicated data management example: processing hospital admission/discharge data and merging with patient file
- Working with dates
- Working with dates and time of day
- Programming bootstrapped standard errors
- Programming Monte Carlo simulations
- Use of postfile to program bootstraps and simulations beyond the capabilities of bstrap and simulate
Lecture 4: Ado-files
- Organizing files and directories
- Writing real ado-files: command to run analysis do-files
- Automatically logging analysis
- Putting time-and-date stamps on analyses
- Error handling
- Writing on-line help files
- Temporary variables
- Temporarily destroying data
- Temporary files
- Analysis-specific ado-files
- General-purpose ado-files
- Converting analysis-specific to general-purpose ado-files
- More on display and producing formatted output
- Parsing commands with syntax
- Version control