On Sat, 5 Feb 2022, Sven Schreiber wrote:
 Am 04.02.2022 um 19:37 schrieb Allin Cottrell:
> 
> Thanks, I've now installed RJDemetra (RJD for short) and can 
> confirm the results you posted. In the cases where there's 
> noticeable disagreement (RSA3, RSA5c) the programs are either 
> arriving at a different ARIMA specification, choosing different 
> calendar effects, or finding different (but overlapping) 
> outliers. Here's a summary, gleaned from the verbose printouts 
> from RJD and X13A.
 Thanks for the analysis, Allin. 
[...analysis of "RSA3" case, using both X13A b58 and b39]
 What's the background on those specific builds, I mean why did
you 
 choose exactly 39 and 58? I suppose one is the latest, but the 
 other? 
b58 is the latest. b39 happens to have been current the last time I 
built X13A for use with gretl, some years back, and I kept the 
source code around.
> If we believe RJD's loglikelihood and AICC, it's doing a
little 
> better.
 I don't think we should compare the likelihood over different
 specifications, especially different number of outliers. 
Agreed.
 OK, the AICC may be a different story, but for outlier-style 
 regressors it's still not so clear. 
OK, fair point.
On the "RSA5c" set of options:
> RJD[emetra]:
> arima (2 1 1)(0 1 1) in levels + 4 outliers + 8 calendar effects
> (calendar: 6 daily coeffs plus Leap year + Easter[1])
> Log likelihood = -799.1, aicc = 1634
> 
> X13A, b58 and b39 (identical):
> arima (2 1 1)(0 1 1) in levels + 5 outliers + 2 calendar effects
> (calendar: Weekday (1-coeff) and Easter[1])
> Log likelihood = -795.1, aicc = 1617
 Again, more outliers get a better AICC. I wonder if that's already a
 pattern. 
Hmm, could be.
> I'm not sure if the respective programs are starting with the
same
> "test-down-from" spec for calendar effects; it doesn't look like it.
 Do you know what "Weekday (1-coeff)" means? 
That was my transcription based on this literal X13A output:
<X13A>
Regression Model
-------------------------------------------------------------------
                              Parameter        Standard
  Variable                     Estimate           Error      t-value
-------------------------------------------------------------------
  Leap Year                      2.0903         0.68242         3.06
  1-Coefficient Trading Day
    Weekday                      0.6927         0.03090        22.42
  **Sat/Sun (derived)           -1.7316         0.07725       -22.42
  Easter[1]                     -2.5476         0.43436        -5.87
</X13A>
 The RSA5c spec starts with different regressors for each day of 
 the week AFAIK, and our "trading_days" is transformed into X13's 
 "td" if I remember correctly. Does it mean of those regressors 
 only one survived? Or is there a problem somewhere and it 
 effectively switched to "td1coef" somehow (which our 
 "working_days" is supposed to trigger)? 
Well, there's nothing explicit in the X13A output to say that the
results above represent an AICC-based pruning of a less parsimonious 
starting point. On the other hand, if I force the less parsimonious 
version by passing to X13A
regression{ variables = (td easter[1]) }
then I get all 6 td coefficients but 1 fewer outliers, and a worse 
AICC (plus a worse loglik despite the extra parameters, FWIW). So it 
could well be that X13A has silently pruned in the background.
 In general there are a billion ways to implement this search 
 strategy, of course. In the X13 doc I read somewhere that they 
 hold the Arima model fixed for that search; this is very 
 reasonable, but obviously a simplification due to the 
 computational burden. Jdemetra being more recent, maybe they skip 
 some of the simplifications. 
Hmm. When both RJD and X13A are fed the RSA5c spec, they arrive at 
the same ARIMA (2 1 1)(0 1 1). But when X13A is forced to include 6 
trading-day coeffs it switches to (3 1 1)(0 1 1). So I'm not seeing 
any evidence of X13A skipping complications that are handled by RJD. 
Or am I missing your point?
 (Plus, there's the notorious leap year handling...) 
OMG, I don't even want to think about that!
Allin