rescale

• Stata programs
• rescale

Rescale categorical variables using numbers found in value labels

By Tony Brady

rescale recodes categorical variables using numbers found in the value labels matching a regular expression.

rescale is useful when you have categorical variables that include scale values in the value labels. For instance you may have the variable eligible:

But the underlying categories are coded 1, 2 and 3 rather than the codes given in the value label (0, 1 and 999):

It's easy to recode the variable and keep the value labels intact by using rescale:

Note rescale works on numeric variables with value labels. If you have a categorical variable stored in a string format, first encode it to convert to numeric, then run rescale.

By default rescale uses the first integer in the value label as the value to recode to. If this is incorrect you can specify your own pattern to match on. For example:

rescale, regex("\(([0-9]+)\)")

would match numbers in brackets in the value labels – such as 12 month survival (0), 12 month survival (1).