Creating matrix

[Rezanur Rahaman]

Hello,

I am a recent user of stata, trying to do some catchy analysis.

I have done FTD33 pathogen testing in virology lab on 219 patients for which I was aiming to create a matrix for monodetection and codetection of pathogens but not sure how to do this. Could you please help me out. Appreciate it.

Kind regards,
Rezanur

[William Lisowski]

Welcome to Satalist.

I'm sorry to say that you will likely find only a small number of users of Stata who have the background that allows them to interpret your question and be able to infer what you hope to accomplish in Stata.

Please review the Statalist FAQ linked to from the top of the page, as well as from the Advice on Posting link on the page you used to create your post. Note especially sections 9-12 on how to best pose your question.

The more you help others understand your problem, the more likely others are to be able to help you solve your problem.

Also, you have posted your topic in Statalist's Mata Forum, which is used for discussions of Stata's Mata language. While your objective is a matrix, it is not clear that the Mata commands in Stata will be necessary to achieve that goal. An improved question will see a much larger audience if you post it in Statalist's General Forum.

[Rezanur Rahaman]

Thank you William for your kind response. I feel ashamed of being a noob.

[William Lisowski]

Everyone here was a noob once, nothing at all to be ashamed of.

Coming new to Statalist as a source for help on a problem you're having is like renting a car at the airport: I get in and I have places to go and things to see, so I never spend any time reading the owner's manual in the glove compartment before driving away. Then when the sun sets I turn on the windshield wipers instead of the headlights. :-)

The FAQ is the equivalent to the rental car's owner's manual. Some of us struggle to understand how we can better help new members to present their problem as well as they can, but it's a difficult task, especially when writing for as diverse an audience of readers as we have on Statalist. The better we explain ourselves the longer the FAQ; the longer the FAQ the more forbidding it looks.

Take a little time to look over the FAQ, and post a new topic in the General Forum that explains what your data is like (with some sample data if you can, or made-up data if privacy issues intrude) and what you want the results to be like. I expect someone will be able to point you in a useful direction.

Since I'm dispensing advice, let me pass on one other piece - more suggested reading to fit in among your other tasks. :-) The short version is, Stata has very good documentation, especially by the standards of most contemporary software packages (Microsoft Office, for one example), so you should take advantage of it.

When I began using Stata in a serious way, I started - as others here did - by reading my way through the Getting Started with Stata manual relevant to my setup. Chapter 18 then gives suggested further reading, much of which is in the Stata User's Guide, and I worked my way through much of that reading as well. All of these manuals are included as PDFs in the Stata installation (since version 11) and are accessible from within Stata - for example, through Stata's Help menu. The objective in doing this was not so much to master Stata as to be sure I'd become familiar with a wide variety of important basic techniques, so that when the time came that I needed them, I might recall their existence, if not the full syntax, and know how to find out more about them in the help files and manual.

Stata supplies exceptionally good documentation that amply repays the time spent studying it - there's just a lot of it. The path I followed surfaces the things you need to know to get started in a hurry and to work effectively.