OUTDETECT: Stata module to perform Outlier Detection for Inequality and Poverty Analysis

Federico Belotti, Giulia Mancini and Giovanni Vecchi

Statistical Software Components from Boston College Department of Economics

Abstract: outdetect identifies outliers (extreme values) in the distribution of a variable, and assesses their impact on a selection of popular inequality and poverty measures. The procedure by which outliers are detected involves two steps. First, the distribution of the target variable is transformed to approach a standard normal distribution. Second, a threshold is applied to the transformed variable, to set the bounds of an outlier detection region (typically corresponding to the tails of the transformed distribution). Users are allowed to choose among a range of available transformations, or to let outdetect choose the best fitting transformation. The output of outdetect compares "raw" statistics (computed using the target variable as is), to "trimmed” statistics (computed using just those observations that are not flagged as outliers), allowing the analyst to appreciate the impact of extreme values on final estimates. The sensitivity of estimates to outliers can also be gauged by producing diagnostic graphs.

Language: Stata
Requires: Stata version 15 and moremata from SSC (q.v.)
Keywords: outliers; extreme values; welfare analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03-25, Revised 2023-06-02
Note: This module should be installed from within Stata by typing "ssc install outdetect". The module is made available under terms of the GPL v3 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt). Windows users should not attempt to download these files with a web browser.
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Downloads: (external link)
http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/o/outdetect.ado program code (text/plain)
http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/o/outdetect.sthlp help file (text/plain)
http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/l/lout.mlib Mata object library (application/x-stata)
http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/l/lout15.mlib Mata object library (application/x-stata)
http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/l/lout17.mlib Mata object library (application/x-stata)
http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/l/lout18.mlib Mata object library (application/x-stata)

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