SAS: Design of experiments - Marketing research

All,

There have been some requests for SAS tips so I'll post a couple of useful things over the next couple of weeks. SAS has a lot of functions that STATA doesn't or are hard in STATA. For example, doing maps with data is quite easy, like displaying immunization rates by country on a world map (more on this later).

For this post, I just wanted to point pople to an excellent resource if you ever have to design an experiment.

http://support.sas.com/techsup/technote/mr2010.pdf

This was put together by Walter Kuhfeld and is an excellent guide on how to design discrete choice and conjoint studies using SAS, along with a number of other marketing based analyses. These obviously come out of the marketing area, but these techniques are being increasingly adapted to the health care field to elicit patient or provider preferences. I found it quite useful in a discrete choice experiment I will be testing on physicians dealing with smoking cessation.

Best,
Monkey out...

STATA: file write or a way to exporting of almost anything

This is a bit of a repost, but it is so useful that I thought it would useful to people.

Ever want to get a formatted table of summary statitics exported directly from Stata? Outreg2 does a great job with exporting regression results, but what about variable means, variances, or other summary statitics. A great way to do this is with file write. This is a great command and provides you with a lot of control. Its simple:

sysuse auto
file open myfile using"C:/mytable.txt", write replace
file write myfile "Table of descriptive stats" _n _n
file write myfile _tab "Mean" _tab "5th pct" _tab "95th pct"_n
quietly sum price, detail
file write "Price" _tab %7.2f (r(mean)) _tab %7.2f (r(p5)) ///
_tab %7.2f (r(p95)) _n
file close myfile

Here is what just happened. We first open a file with the handle "myfile" that is associated with a text file "mytable.txt". Then I write a header on the first line. The _n sends a hard return, so I sent two hard returns after the header. Then I write my column headers, seperated by tabs (_tab). Then I write my formated summary statistics (%7.2f), again seperated by tabs. Note: you can send anything that is shown in return list or ereturn list so it is pretty flexible. Finally, I close the file. I have created a tab deliminated text file that we can open in excel or elsewhere.

When you combine this with loops and lists of variables that you can store in a local macro, it makes exporting standard tables very easy and automated. See my February 2010 post for a more complicated example.

Happy coding...