I made several additions and updates to packages on SSC over the last months about which I never informed Stata Forum readers. Here is a list of these additions and updates.

New packages:
  • heatplot: command to create heat plots from variables or matrices. One example of a heat plot is a two-dimensional histogram in which the frequencies of combinations of binned Y and X are displayed as rectangular (or hexagonal) fields using a color gradient. Another example is a plot of a trivariate distribution where the color gradient is used to visualize the (average) value of Z within bins of Y and X. Yet another example is a plot that displays the contents of a matrix, say, a correlation matrix or a spacial weights matrix, using a color gradient. The package also contains command hexplot to draw heat plots using hexagons.

    I will give a presentation on heatplot at next week's Stata meeting in Munich (https://www.stata.com/meeting/germany19/).
  • robbox: a command to produce (robust) box plots. Supported are the standard box plot (equivalent to graph box), the skewness-adjusted box plot based on the medcouple by Hubert and Vandervieren (2008), and the generalized box plot based on Tukey's g-and-h distribution by Bruffaerts et al. (2014).
  • ColrSpace: a class-based color management system implemented in Mata. It supports a wide variety of color spaces (such as CIE XYZ, CIE Lab, HCL, CIECAM02, etc.) and translations among them, provides color generators and a large collection of named palettes, and features functionality such as color interpolation, grayscale conversion, or color vision deficiency simulation.

Updated packages:
  • grstyle: some small changes so that grstyle can profit from the full functionality provided by the updated colorpalette command
  • palettes: The colorpalette command included in the package is now based on ColrSpace. It has many new features such as high-quality color interpolation, gray-scale conversion, color vision deficiency simulation, additional color input formats, and several new pre-defined color palettes such as, e.g. the viridis palette from matplotlib (see https://matplotlib.org/). The colorpalette command is used by grstyle and by heatplot.
  • robstat (a command to compute various robust statistics of location, scale, skewness, and kurtosis): The the standard error estimates for the M-estimates of scale computed by robstat were only valid for symmetric distribution. The updated version now uses methods that are also valid for asymmetric distributions.

To install or update any of the above packages, type
Code:
. ssc install name, replace
where name is the package name.

ben


Bruffaerts, C., V. Verardi, and C. Vermandele. 2014. A generalized boxplot for skewed and heavy-tailed distributions. Statistics and Probability Letters 95: 110-117.

Hubert, M., and E. Vandervieren. 2008. An adjusted boxplot for skewed distributions. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 52: 5186-5201.