Mata is both an interactive environment for manipulating matrices and a full development environment that can produce compiled and optimized code. Though you don't need to program to use Stata, it is comforting to know that a fast and complete programming language is an integral part of Stata. Mata has the structures, pointers, and classes that you expect in your programming language and adds direct support for matrix programming. Stata also includes an advanced programming language-Mata.

Stata makes this process accessible to all researchers. Sequencing commands to read and clean data, then to perform statistical tests and estimation, and finally to report results is at the heart of reproducible research. These commands work the same way after virtually every estimator. There is also a full suite of postestimation commands to perform hypothesis tests, form linear and nonlinear combinations, make predictions, form contrasts, and even perform marginal analysis with interaction plots. What you learn about data management commands often applies to estimation commands, and vice-versa.

You simply add vce(robust) to any estimator to obtain standard errors and hypothesis tests that are robust to many common assumptions. For example, you simply add if gender='female' to any command to limit your analysis to females in your sample. Even better, everything you learn about performing a task can be applied to other tasks. Stata's commands for performing tasks are intuitive and easy to learn. Everything is available right within Stata. But don't worry, type help my topic, and Stata will search its keywords, indexes, and even community-contributed packages to bring you everything you need to know about your topic. Stata is a big package and so has lots of documentation – over 17,000 pages in 33 manuals.

Want even more detail? Our Methods and formulas sections provide the specifics of what is being computed, and our References point you to even more information. We give you a Quick start for every feature, showing some of the most common uses. The examples give you the data so you can work along in Stata and even extend the analyses. Each estimator is fully documented and includes several examples on real data, with real discussions of how to interpret the results. When it comes time to perform your analyses or understand the methods you are using, Stata does not leave you high and dry or ordering books to learn every detail.Įach of our data management features is fully explained and documented and shown in practice on real examples.

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