Bar Chart Percentiles

[Lisa Acker]

Hello,

I plotted a bar graph of the education level agains the mean of the average pay. Because of outliers, this grap is useless. This is why I want to plot the mean of the average pay for every education level against the 99 percentile of each pay according to the education level. How could I do that?

[Maarten Buis]

So your problem is that the mean is a bad measure of central tendency for a skewed variable like income. Then the solution is to use a good measure of central tendency for a skewed variable, for example the median. This is a well known problem of the mean, and that is why you never see the mean income reported, and always the median income. So in your case the command is:

graph bar (median) income, over(education)

Obviously assuming that the relevant variables are called income and education.

[Nick Cox]

Further, incomes often make more sense on logarithmic scale.