[Gretl-users] Gretl: means by categorical variable

Hi Sven Thanks very much for responding. If I were to include gretl in my review of free to use, easy to use, menu based statistical software, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105959 Would it be okay if I indicated that gretl only lists 5 digits in the summary command? Thanks Gene On Sunday, May 26, 2024 at 09:14:52 AM EDT, Sven Schreiber <sven.schreiber(a)fu-berlin.de&gt; wrote: Am 26.05.2024 um 07:45 schrieb g s: Hi Artur Thanks very much for pointing this out. I did the means by group and it worked, and, good news, the results seem consistent with SAS and with other stat software. Question though.  The results come out like this: AreaRegion = Australia - Oceania (n = 22): Mean                   1.5576e+006 Is it possible to get the values to come out as exact numbers rather than something point something + e006? No. As mentioned in the reference for the 'set' command with respect to the setting 'display_digits', the number of significant digits in the context of 'summary' is currently limited to five. I know that piece of information is not straightforward to find, and I don't think that this setting can be changed via the menus. (When you're just looking at the raw values of the variable, then you can modify the number of significant digits alright, though.) I guess the background is that for formatting reasons we don't want to exceed a field width of 11 characters -- 5 digits + 1 decimal separator + 2 characters "e+" + 3 digits afterwards. For example, in the region Australia - Oceania, the mean population is 1,557,590, but I can't tell if gretl is giving that exact result. In the data set in question, the variable of interest is population, so the number of digits can be quite large. Exactly, there can be a lot of digits, so what would you do then? I don't think there can be a general rule. For example, the mean population for that region in your dataset is _not_ exactly 1,557,590, but instead 1557590.272727 from what I'm seeing here. So the software you were using for comparison apparently was set to report 7 significant digits and/or to only display the integer part of the number. (It's obvioulsy quite rare to get an exact integer number when calculating an average of many numbers.) The general point is that with more or less continuous variables you have to make a compromise most of the time. Having said this, I would accept the point that a limitation to five significant digits could be a problem sometimes. Actually, another question, the summary statistics gives many statistics. Is it possible to include sum as one of them? That is, in addition to mean population by area/region, is it possible to get sum of population by area/region? In the console, it's easy, just type: = aggregate(population, AreaRegion, sum) I'm not aware of how to do that easily in the menus. cheers sven _______________________________________________ Gretl-users mailing list -- gretl-users(a)gretlml.univpm.it To unsubscribe send an email to gretl-users-leave(a)gretlml.univpm.it Website: https://gretlml.univpm.it/postorius/lists/gretl-users.gretlml.univpm.it/