Speaking Stata: Graphing Distributions

Abstract

Graphing univariate distributions is central to both statistical graphics, in general, and Stata's graphics, in particular. Now that Stata 8 is out, a review of official and user-written commands is timely. The emphasis here is on going beyond what is obviously and readily available, with pointers to minor and major trickery and various user-written commands. For plotting histogram-like displays, kernel-density estimates and plots based on distribution functions or quantile functions, a large variety of choices is now available to the researcher.