COVID-19 visualizations with Stata Part 1: An introduction to data setup and customized graphs

This guide introduces data visualization of publicly available COVID-19 datasets in Stata. Stata, a standard software used in the field of economics for statistical analysis, is usually not the first option when one thinks of data science and data visualizations. Therefore, the aim of this guide is to allow Stata users to go beyond the default graph schemes and start making visualizations that are more appealing and comparable to graphs produced in other, and data science-oriented languages like R, Python, Java etc. While Stata does not have the full flexibility that these languages provide, recent advances in user-written programs have considerably improved the options to produce highly customized graphs, maps, color schemes, and other formatting options, which can make graphs pop-out more.

This post is the first part of a Stata COVID-19 data visualization series where different graphs, maps, animations, will be introduced using publicly available datasets from the internet. To kick-off this series, this post also discusses at length the importance of data management with an introduction to automation of tasks to make scripts more dynamic. Since multiple files are imported, several different scripts are written, datasets are generated, and figures are produced, a structured folder system allows for easy tracking of files as they start multiplying over time. Therefore, the first part of the series is dedicated to file and data organization, which also…