Twoway scatter: supress/allow marker labels based on some conditon?

[Daniel Moore]

Hi Stata users,

I am interested in suppressing marker labels in scatter plots based on some condition because the labels become unreadable in clusters.

Here is a replicable example:

 sysuse auto, clear
twoway scatter mpg price, mlabel(make)

What I had hoped would work was:

 twoway scatter mpg price, mlabel(make) if price >= 10000

However, -if- is not allowed in the options for -scatter-.

Another way I tried was

 twoway scatter price mpg if price < 10000 , overlay addplot(twoway scatter price mpg if price >=  10000, mlabel(make)  )

but the -overlay- option is not allowed.


Any suggestions?
Thank you!

[Nick Cox]

Two solutions that work:

 scatter price mpg if price < 10000 || scatter price mpg if price >=  10000, mlabel(make)  legend(off) 

You will get different marker symbols and colours by default, which can be fixed if not desired.

gen make2 = make if price >= 10000
 scatter price mpg, mlabel(make2) 

make2 is empty when the if condition is not satisfied. So there's always a marker label; it is just that some are empty strings.

[Daniel Moore]

Fantastic. Thanks a lot, Nick!