Speaking Stata: A Set of Utilities for Managing Missing Values

Abstract

Identifying frequencies and patterns of missing values and preliminary cleaning of missing data are common and fundamental parts of statistical data management. I offer a new command, missings, as a replacement for, and extension of, my previous commands nmissing (Cox 1999, Stata Technical Bulletin 49: 7–8; 2001a, Stata Technical Bulletin 60: 2–3; 2003, Stata Journal 3: 449; 2005, Stata Journal 5: 607) and dropmiss (Cox 2001b, Stata Technical Bulletin 60: 7–8; 2008, Stata Journal 8: 594). I also make comparisons with similar commands.