gunique

Efficiently calculate unique values of a variable or group of variables.

gunique is a faster alternative to unique. It reports the number of unique values for the varlist. At the moment, its main difference from distinct is that it always considers the variables jointly. It also has slighly different options. For example, this supports the by(varlist) option that also appears in the unique command, but does not support computing the number of unique values for variables individually.

Important

Run gtools, upgrade to update gtools to the latest stable version.

Syntax

gunique varlist [if] [in] [, detail]

Options

  • by(varlist) counts unique values within levels of varlist and stores them in a new variable named _Unique. The user can specify the name of the new variable via the option generate(varname).

  • generate(varname) supplies an alternative name for the new variable created by by.

  • replace Replaces _Unique (or the variable specified by generate()) if it exists.

  • detail request summary statistics on the number of records which are present for unique values of the varlist. With by(), it also prints the levels with the most unique values.

Gtools options

(Note: These are common to every gtools command.)

  • compress Try to compress strL to str#. The Stata Plugin Interface has only limited support for strL variables. In Stata 13 and earlier (version 2.0) there is no support, and in Stata 14 and later (version 3.0) there is read-only support. The user can try to compress strL variables using this option.

  • forcestrl Skip binary variable check and force gtools to read strL variables (14 and above only). Gtools gives incorrect results when there is binary data in strL variables. This option was included because on some windows systems Stata detects binary data even when there is none. Only use this option if you are sure you do not have binary data in your strL variables.

  • verbose prints some useful debugging info to the console.

  • benchmark or bench(level) prints how long in seconds various parts of the program take to execute. Level 1 is the same as benchmark. Levels 2 and 3 additionally prints benchmarks for internal plugin steps.

  • hashmethod(str) Hash method to use. default automagically chooses the algorithm. biject tries to biject the inputs into the natural numbers. spooky hashes the data and then uses the hash.

  • oncollision(str) How to handle collisions. A collision should never happen but just in case it does gtools will try to use native commands. The user can specify it throw an error instead by passing oncollision(error).

Stored results

gunique stores the following in r():

Scalars

    r(unique)     number of groups (last variable or joint)
    r(N)          number of non-missing observations
    r(J)          number of groups
    r(minJ)       largest group size
    r(maxJ)       smallest group size

Examples

You can download the raw code for the examples below here 

. sysuse auto, clear
(1978 Automobile Data)

. gunique *
N = 69; 69 balanced groups of size 1

. gunique *, miss
N = 74; 74 balanced groups of size 1

. gunique make-headroom
N = 69; 69 balanced groups of size 1

. gunique rep78, d

                          __000000
-------------------------------------------------------------
      Percentiles      Smallest
 1%            2              2
 5%            2              8
10%            2             11       Obs                   5
25%            8             18       Sum of Wgt.           5

50%           11                      Mean               13.8
                        Largest       Std. Dev.      10.73313
75%           18              8
90%           30             11       Variance          115.2
95%           30             18       Skewness       .5573459
99%           30             30       Kurtosis       2.113785

. gunique rep78, by(foreign)

'rep78' had 5 unique values in 69 observations.
Variable _Unique has the number of unique values of 'rep78' by 'foreign'.

Acknowledgements

gunique was written to mimic the functionality of the community-contributed command unique, the latter written by