From the course: Introduction to Stata 15

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Missing values

Missing values - Stata Tutorial

From the course: Introduction to Stata 15

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Missing values

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- [Instructor] In this session we'll explore the concept of missing values and how Stata treats these. Ensuring that you identify, track, and properly code missing values is crucial to good data analysis. Many mistakes both analytical and data management occur because users did not properly manage their missing data. In the real world, missing data is everywhere. And I've personally yet to find a real world data source that doesn't have missing values. You should be aware that there's a particular danger of missing values in Stata because of the way Stata treats them. It is important that you always keep this in the back of your mind. So how does Stata treat the missing value? Well, the key concept to be aware of is that Stata evaluates missing values as positive infinity. In other words, any cell that contains a missing value in this case, denoted by a full stop character, will be treated as positive infinity. Stata must assign missing values some kind of value on the number line as…

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