I'm relatively new to Stata and am trying to count the number of active cases an employee has open over time in my dataset (see link below for example). I tried writing a loop using forvalues based on an example I found online, but keep getting
invalid syntax
For each EmpID I want to count the number of cases that employee had open when a new case was added to the queue. So if a case is added with an OpenDate of 03/15/2015 and the EmpID has two other cases open at the time, the code would assign a value of 2 to NumActiveWhenOpened field. A case is considered active if (1) its OpenDate is less then the new case's OpenDate & (2) its CloseDate is greater than the new case's OpenDate.
The link below provides an example. I'm trying to write a loop that creates the NumActiveWhenOpened column. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
https://i.sstatic.net/z4iyR.jpg
Here is the code that is not working. I'm sure there are several things wrong with it and I'm not sure how to store the count in the [NumActiveWhenOpen] field.
by EmpID: generate CaseNum = _n
egen group = group(EmpID)
su group, meanonly
gen NumActiveWhenOpen = 0
forvalues i = 1/ 'r(max)' {
forvalues x = 1/CaseNum if group == `i'{
count if OpenDate[_n] > OpenDate[_n-x] & CloseDate[_n-x] > OpenDate[_n]
}
}
This sounds like a problem discussed in http://www.stata-journal.com/article.html?article=dm0068 but let's try to be self-contained. I am not sure that I understand the definitions, but this may help.
I'll steal part of Roberto Ferrer's sandbox.
clear
set more off
input ///
caseid str15(open close) empid
1 "1/1/2010" "3/1/2010" 1
2 "2/5/2010" "" 1
3 "2/15/2010" "4/7/2010" 1
4 "3/5/2010" "" 1
5 "3/15/2010" "6/15/2010" 1
6 "3/24/2010" "3/24/2010" 1
1 "1/1/2010" "3/1/2010" 2
2 "2/5/2010" "" 2
3 "2/15/2010" "4/7/2010" 2
4 "3/5/2010" "" 2
5 "3/15/2010" "6/15/2010" 2
end
gen d1 = date(open, "MDY")
gen d2 = date(close, "MDY")
format %td d1 d2
drop open close
reshape long d, i(empid caseid) j(status)
replace status = -1 if status == 2
replace status = . if missing(d)
bysort empid (d) : gen nopen = sum(status)
bysort empid d : replace nopen = nopen[_N]
l
The idea is to reshape so that each pair of dates becomes two observations. Then if we code each opening by 1 and each closing by -1 the total number of active cases is their cumulative sum. That's all. Here are the results:
. l, sepby(empid)
+---------------------------------------------+
| empid caseid status d nopen |
|---------------------------------------------|
1. | 1 1 1 01jan2010 1 |
2. | 1 2 1 05feb2010 2 |
3. | 1 3 1 15feb2010 3 |
4. | 1 1 -1 01mar2010 2 |
5. | 1 4 1 05mar2010 3 |
6. | 1 5 1 15mar2010 4 |
7. | 1 6 1 24mar2010 4 |
8. | 1 6 -1 24mar2010 4 |
9. | 1 3 -1 07apr2010 3 |
10. | 1 5 -1 15jun2010 2 |
11. | 1 2 . . 2 |
12. | 1 4 . . 2 |
|---------------------------------------------|
13. | 2 1 1 01jan2010 1 |
14. | 2 2 1 05feb2010 2 |
15. | 2 3 1 15feb2010 3 |
16. | 2 1 -1 01mar2010 2 |
17. | 2 4 1 05mar2010 3 |
18. | 2 5 1 15mar2010 4 |
19. | 2 3 -1 07apr2010 3 |
20. | 2 5 -1 15jun2010 2 |
21. | 2 4 . . 2 |
22. | 2 2 . . 2 |
+---------------------------------------------+
The bottom line is no loops needed, but by: helps mightily. A detail useful here is that the cumulative sum function sum() ignores missings.