RATS Version 7.1
RATS Version 7.1 is is an update to Version 7 that offers many new features, including:
- New GBOX instruction for doing Box plots
- Improvements to the DSGE instruction (for Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models).
- Improvements to SQL/ODBC support to allow for unlimited-length SQL query strings. Also, the Mac version now supports SQL data access. (Pro versions only).
- New "right-click" pop-up menus for quick access to many operations via the mouse.
- New WEIGHT option on many instructions, for dealing with stratified samples.
- The ability to work with multiple "reports" simultaneously.
- New General to Specific option for stepwise regressions.
See the
July, 2008 RATSletter for more information on 7.1. See below for details on Version 7.
Ordering RATS 7.1
- Users with a current Update Subscription will receive their copies of Version 7.1 on CD automatically.
- For other users, the basic price to update to Version 7.1 is $25 for users with Version 7.0, and $150 for users with older versions of RATS (6.35 or older).
- We do urge you to consider purchasing an update subscription, so you can take advantage of continuing improvements to RATS as soon as they are released.
See RATS Updates and Update Subscriptions for details.
- See the Pricing Information page if you are interested in purchasing a new copy of RATS.
RATS Version 7.0
Below are some of the highlights of RATS 7.0. See the October, 2007 RATSletter for more information.
- New and Improved Wizards: RATS now offers more than two dozen menu- and dialog-driven "Wizards", providing point-and-click interfaces for everything from reading in data to estimating and analyzing VAR models. Many of the existing Wizards are now more powerful and easier to use.
- Improved Graphics: Version 7 provides better looking graphs, and gives the user much more control over graph appearance.
- New DSGE instruction: DSGE (for Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models) analyzes linear and non-linear models with expectational terms, solving for a set of matrices which can be input into the DLM (state space model) instruction.
- More IV/GMM Support:
The four “least squares” instructions (LINREG and NLLS for single equations, SUR and NLSYSTEM for systems) now have a common set of options for handling GMM estimation in a more flexible way, including choice of method for updating the weight matrices. The biggest change here is the addition of GMM capabilities to SUR (Seemingly Unrelated Regressions).
- New Functions: Version 7 adds thirty new built-in functions, bringing the total of new functions added since version 6.0 to almost ninety.
- New Manuals: The revised RATS 7 manuals document all of the new features and changes introduced in Version 7, as well as those that appeared in incremental updates released since Version 6.0.
- Simplified Syntax: Version 7 introduces a streamlined syntax for many instructions, with easy-to-remember options replacing longer lists of parameters. Note, however, that we still support the older syntax--RATS is largely backwards compatible to Version 4.
If you haven't been keeping up to date with RATS, you'll be surprised by all of the changes we've made in recent years. Version 7 is actually the 7th update to RATS since Version 6.0 was released back in 2004.
To see what you've been missing, see the Revision History page, which provides version-by-version details.