Coefplot: Labelling X-Axis on a Time Series

[Adam Gaffney]

This seems like it should have a simple answer, but I can't find it. I am struggling to label the x-axis the way I would like in coefplot, and have spent some time with documentation and previous posts without finding a satisfactory answer.

I am using coefplot to plot mean healthcare visits (and CIs) in a population over time. This is complex survey data.

First, I calculate means by year:

svy: mean providervisit, over(year)
estimates store means

Next, I use coefplot, using the rename option to rename my coefficients to display only the year (e.g. 1996, 1997, etc.), because otherwise they would be labelled "[email protected]" etc.

 coefplot means, , vertical /// 
rename(^.+@([0-9]+)\..+$ = \1, regex) nooffsets /// 
recast(connected) cirecast(rcap) ytitle("Mean Annual Visits")

The resultant plot (below) labels every individual year on the x-axis. However, I want to only show some years, say every 2 or so years (e.g. 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, etc.). It would be of course easy to do this with twoway using xlabel, but I want to use coefplot rather than say collapse (mean) followed by twoway because this allows me to plot CIs with complex survey data. Does anyone know if this is possible?

[Andrew Musau]

coefplot is from SSC, as you are asked to explain in FAQ Advice #12. You will likely still need to use -xlabel()- to exclude some years. Here is some technique:

local labels
forval year= 1996(2)2021{
    local labels `labels' `=`year'-1995' "`year'"
}

coefplot means,  vertical ///
xlab(`labels') nooffsets ///
recast(connected) cirecast(rcap) ytitle("Mean Annual Visits")

For your future posts, present a reproducible example as recommended in the abovementioned FAQ Advice.

[Adam Gaffney]

Hi Andrew, thanks a million for this recommendation, and will do so in future posts.

Best,

Adam