basic questions/comments on X13
by Sven Schreiber
Hi,
I'm not usually in the business of needing to do seasonal adjustment
myself, but it seems I will be, and I'm wondering about the following
things about gretl:
- The documentation still mostly talks about X12. This concerns the
contents or menu column on the left of the main web page, the page
http://gretl.sourceforge.net/x12a/x12a.html to which it leads, various
places in the user guide, and also stuff like the $x12a and $x12adir
accessors. Even though I know that x13 works as a drop-in replacement, I
find this situation confusing. Isn't X12 by now really obsolete?
- AFAICS, there is no hansl scripting way to actually call X13 and get
its output, is there? When I use the GUI to invoke X13, I find no trace
of that in the command log.
- For a couple of years now, the open-source software JDemetra+ is the
official thing to do seasonal adjustment in Europe.
(https://github.com/jdemetra) Unfortunately, as the name suggests, it is
Java-based. There is an official R wrapper. I guess it should be
feasible to write a hansl wrapper for the R wrapper as a function
package, which sounds more complicated than it would be, I think. Of
course, the core still runs on Java, which therefore needs to be installed.
thanks
sven
2 years, 8 months
little problem with saved sessions and local decimal separator settings
by Sven Schreiber
Hi,
working with the local decimal comma, I saved a session file. Then I
changed the settings to not use the decimal comma, and restarted gretl.
I reloaded the saved session, and then in the settings dialog I saw a
comma for example in the numeric field for "standard plot scaling".
Restarting gretl again and _not_ loading the session worked as expected,
i.e. no decimal comma anymore. Somehow the session settings seem to
override the global user switch.
thanks
sven
2 years, 9 months
delimiter for data files in text format
by Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
This has been dabeted several times, but IMO the issue still remains.
A colleague was trying to use gretl to import a dataset (with extension
.txt, but that doesn't really matter) whose first lines look like this:
"num"|"x"|"y"|"z"
"1"|0.273856207444503|-0.036672201779096|0.854726937504524
"2"|2.24481689268639|-0.546030016142993|0.23406506726493
"3"|-0.125423034417563|-0.606878201926287|-0.853921693817499
"4"|-0.54357344128812|1.10835827274681|-0.104247994046094
"5"|-1.45939839398061|-0.274494522530397|0.111905961611328
Eventually, we managed to solve the problem by manually editing the file
and replacing pipe characters by commas, but it would have been nice to
have an option to give the CSV importer the delimiter character to split
columns.
This would also solve cases when you get a mish-mash of commas and
semi-colons, like in (pseudo-)CSV files produced by national versions of
some spreadsheets.
Allin, I think I remember you were against this feature for some reason,
but I can't recall what it was. Could you please remind me? Thanks!
-------------------------------------------------------
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
(formerly known as Università di Ancona)
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
-------------------------------------------------------
2 years, 9 months
curious bug
by Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Hi all,
being the king of the typo has its advantages: for example, you find weird
bugs:
<hansl>
nulldata 60
setobs 4 1:1
y = normal()
ols y 0 y(0 -to -1) # note the typo
ols y 0 y(1)
</hansl>
The two models are identical.
-------------------------------------------------------
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
(formerly known as Università di Ancona)
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
-------------------------------------------------------
2 years, 9 months
problem with "make pdfdocs" on git
by Sven Schreiber
Hi,
I'm encountering the following problem (after doing make clean,
configure, and make successfully) with "make pdfdocs". This is on
current git, or actually, the file doc/tex/pkgbook.tex is also changed
here and not yet pushed, but it doesn't look as if that's the problem.
I'm using Linux on a virtual machine running under Windows here, if that
matters.
thanks
sven
---
make[1]: Entering directory '/ ... /gretl-git/doc'
make -C tex
make[2]: Entering directory '/ ... /gretl-git/doc/tex'
make[2]: stat: ../../doc/tex/persistent.tex: Too many levels of symbolic
links
make[2]: *** No rule to make target '../../doc/tex/persistent.tex',
needed by 'date.tex'. Stop.
make[2]: Leaving directory '/ ... /gretl-git/doc/tex'
make[1]: *** [Makefile:11: tex] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory '/ ... /gretl-git/doc'
make: *** [Makefile:72: pdfdocs] Error 2
2 years, 9 months
quiet option issues with 'append' and 'store'
by Sven Schreiber
Hi,
I'm noticing the following. First:
<hansl>
open australia
append denmark --quiet # still get message!
</hansl>
... despite the doc saying that the quiet option should lead to no printout.
Secondly, it would also be useful if 'store' had such an option in the
first place. The use case is the same as for append, namely that in some
scripts/packages the printout shouldn't be cluttered with more or less
meaningless path echo information.
This is with a snapshot from two weeks ago.
thanks
sven
2 years, 10 months
crash with dbnomics GUI (on Windows)
by Sven Schreiber
Hi,
I just saw a reproducible crash here:
Snapshot Nov 2nd, open dbnomics from the menus, double-click on
Destatis, move forward one or two pages (click right arrow), enter a
search term in the text field (like "gross fixed capital"), select "on
this page" or so, and click the search button -> arrivederci...
cheers
sven
2 years, 10 months
Nice daily dataset
by Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Folks,
while trying out a few time-series things, I realised we don't have a
nice 7-day-per-week sample dataset to play with weekly + yearly
seasonality, exogenous effects etc.
So I found one from Kaggle and packaged it in gdt format (attached). The
original source is
https://www.kaggle.com/contactprad/bike-share-daily-data
Would you have objections if I added it to our repertoire of sample
datasets?
-------------------------------------------------------
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
(formerly known as Università di Ancona)
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
-------------------------------------------------------
2 years, 10 months
$sysinfo.os vs. $windows (and Mac?)
by Sven Schreiber
Hi all,
the doc says that $sysinfo.os gives "linux", "osx", "windows" or other
as a piece of introspection. An older accessor is $windows, which
returns 0 or 1.
So the $windows accessor appears redundant and doesn't cover the Mac -
should it perhaps be discouraged for new hansl scripts? (I guess
$sysinfo.os has been around long enough such that there are no real
compatibility issues.) At least I guess the doc for $windows should also
point to $sysinfo.os.
As a further minor point, AFAIK MacOS is not named "OS X" anymore. But
obviously, changing the return string to "macos" or something like that
would raise backwards compatibility problems. Again, maybe the easiest
thing is simply to add a note to the doc?
thanks
sven
2 years, 10 months