[Gretl-devel] devel update

Hello all, gretl-devel has been pretty quiet lately, so I thought perhaps I should put out a status update. It's not that your coders have been idle lately. On the contrary, Jack and I have had quite a voluminous correspondence over the past couple of months -- but the issues we've been discussing have mostly been quite technical questions that I thought (righly or wrongly) would probably tax the patience of most gretl-devel subscribers. Anyway, here are some of the main news points: * bundles: we have a new data type that hopefully should be very useful for writers of complex function packages. This is now written up in chapter 11 of the Gretl User's Guide. * dynamic panel data models: we have a new command, "hidden" up to this point, named "dpanel", which represents a substantial improvement over the old "arbond" command. It can handle "system GMM" (Blundell-Bond) and also offers greater flexibility of specification. The one respect in which it's less flexible than "arbond" is that it does not offer the option of orthogonal deviations as an alternative to differencing; it seems to us that this is more of a theoretical curiosity than a live option of interest to practitioners. We just have to write up the documentation for dpanel then we'll expose it for testing. * Time-series filtering: we now have, I think, a state-of-the-art implementation of the Butterworth filter (something that Stephen Pollock talked about at the first gretl conference in Bilbao last year). You can find it under the Variable/Filter menu in the GUI when you have loaded a time-series dataset, or via the bwfilt() function. * ARIMA: the possibility of handling missing values in the context of ARIMA estimation has been open ever since we started using the Kalman filter for "native" exact ML estimation. We've recently picked this up and, hopefully, before long we'll be able to offer this facility for all ARIMA models. Allin