Coming from Stata
Contents
Coming from Stata#
This chapter has benefitted enormously from Daniel M. Sullivan’s excellent notes.
The biggest difference between Python and Stata is that Python is a fully-fledged programming language, which means it can do lots of things, while Stata is really just for data analysis. What this means in practice is that sometimes the notation to do this or that operation in Python (or any other general purpose programming language) is less concise than in Stata. There is greater competition for each command in Python because it does many more things.
Another difference is that, in Stata, there is one dataset in memory that is represented as matrix where each column is a “variable” with a unique name. In Python, variables can be anything, even functions! But most data analysis in Python is done using dataframes, which are objects that are somewhat similar to a single dataset in Stata. In Python, you can have as many DataFrames as you like in action at once. This causes the first major notational differences; in Python, you need to specify which dataframe you want to perform an operation on, in addition to which column (or row, or entry).
Finally, Python and its data analysis packages are free.
Regardless of Python not being a programming language solely dedicated to data analysis, it really does have first class support for data analysis via its pandas package. Support for doing regressions is perhaps less good than Stata, and certainly a bit more verbose—but you can still do pretty much every standard operation you can think of.
Stata <==> Python#
What follows is a giant table of translations between Stata code and Python’s pandas(panel-data-analysis) package. Some of the econometrics examples below use Daniel M Sullivan’s econtools package, but you could also use statsmodels. It’s not meant to be exhaustive but it should give you a flavour of the syntax differences and, in some cases, I’ve pointed out where to find further information.
Following Daniel’s treatment, the Stata-to-Python translations assume that, in Python, you have a pandas DataFrame called df
. We will use placeholders like varname
for Stata variables and df['varname']
for the Python equivalent. Remember that you need to import pandas as pd
before running any of the examples that use pd
. For the econometrics examples, you will need import econtools.metrics as mt
or other package imports as specified below.
You can find more on (frequentist) regressions in Regression.
Stata |
Python (pandas) |
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pandas has several reshaping functions, including |
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The table below presents further examples of doing regression with both the statsmodels and linearmodels packages. Where it is available, we’ve specified regressions with a formula API.
Command |
Stata |
Python |
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Fixed Effects (absorbing) |
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Using the linearmodels package: |
Categorical regression |
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Using the statsmodels package: |
Interacting categoricals |
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Using the statsmodels package: |
Robust standard errors |
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Using the statsmodels package: |
Clustered standard errors |
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Using the statsmodels package: |
Two-way clustered standard errors |
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Using the statsmodels package: |
Instrumental variables |
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Using the linearmodels package: |