3
Goals number two and three are achieved by:
separate subcommands for common HMD data tasks: generation of interval variables,
filtering populations, graphing
the usage of data labels, variable labels, value labels, and other descriptive information
Moreover, as is the case with all Stata add-on modules, installation, updating, and deinstallation is
very easy. Finally, the module's workings and options are described in great detail in the associated
Stata help files.
Basic Ideas
hmddata processes zip files that can be downloaded from the HMD website once a user has
registered.
hmddata itself does not connect to HMD data over the web. It accesses files that have
been downloaded manually. After downloading one or more zip files and the extraction of their
contents, the first step is to convert the source text files into Stata files. hmddata convert
accomplishes this. It saves the Stata HMD files to a directory that has been specified using hmddata
settings. hmddata use then can properly access the generated Stata files and load HMD data
sets into memory. Subcommands intervals, popfilter, and graph can be used for frequent
data management tasks. hmddata files and hmddata info are small helper functions.
Installation and Code Updates
Stata 14, which has been released in April 2015, or a later Stata version is required for installation.
hmddata can be installed on all systems that Stata runs on (Windows, Mac, Linux). Note that all
Stata files (and therefore all files created by hmddata) are fully portable across supported
platforms. Testing, however, has only been done under Windows.
The hmddata module can be installed from within Stata by
. net install hmddata ,
from(https://user.demogr.mpg.de/schneider/stata)
Make sure to use the https (and not: http) protocol as in the command above. Updates to the
program can be installed by
. adoupdate hmddata
Deinstallation is done by
. ado uninstall hmddata
If direct installation over the web is not possible, one can also download
https://user.demogr.mpg.de/schneider/stata/hmddata/misc/hmddata.zip, unzip the file contents,
The zip files are located at http://www.mortality.org/cgi-bin/hmd/hmd_download.php.
hmddata in principle also runs under Stata 13, but unfortunately this Stata version has been reported to
sometimes generate errors during installation. The exact source of these errors is not known, but may be
related to the https protocol used for the web install. Moreover, in Stata 13, using reshape with option
j(age) may result in an error, due to a Stata bug which has been fixed with the 06may2014 update. All of
these issues are no longer present in Stata 14 and higher.