[Gretl-devel] long and gappy time series
Hello to all the data wizards out there,
today I hit the limit in the GUI that the earliest year can be set to
1500. But I was looking at the really historic time series from here:
http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/orihome.htm, which
actually starts at 1 A.D. It worked ok via script, but I think it also
should work via the dialog window.
Now let's see if I manage to load that gappy data into the workfile...
no, there are problems, and I think some of them are bugs. (This is
1.9.90 on Win7.)
When I start with an empty annual dataset from 1 to 2100 and try to
append the Maddison data from an Excel worksheet (where I have named the
year column with "date"), the rows/years are not properly matched
against the inner years ("inner" in the sense from 'join'). That's
because of the (huge) gaps in the source file. Strangely, when I use
"obs" instead of "date" then gretl says instead I must not use this as
a
variable name.
I also have to rename many many variables in the xls file before gretl
accepts them, and I think this is really not the optimal way to handle
this because it's very time-consuming and dull; there should be some
automagic "mangling" of the names by gretl, maybe accompanied by a
warning message, or the whole mangling could be a user-configurable option.
Then I tried to treat the whole thing as a (country) panel structure --
but I'm noticing (for the first time although it must have been there
for ages) that when I choose "new dataset" from the menu, the dialog
forces on me the detour to specify the overall number of obs (anybody
got a calculator ready?) and then afterwards only can I impose the panel
structure. Suggestion: why not have radio buttons with
cross-section/time-series/panel in that dialog, and in the panel case
let the user input numbers for both dimensions right away. (plus the
periodicity for time series and panel as well)
Another suggestion: why not allow the use of a time index variable for
time series the same way that index variables are allowed for panels?
I haven't succeeded so far with the import, the only solution I can
think of right now are to add hundreds of empty rows to the source file
to remove the gaps.
Hm.
cheers,
sven