RATS 7 Revision History
This page describes the changes made to RATS in Versions 7.0 through 7.2, in reverse chronological order.
See RATS Information and Features for general information on RATS.
See Version 6 for a history of versions 6.0 through 6.35. For a revision history covering Versions 4.0 through 5.11, see RATS 4.0 through 5.11.
Version 7.2
Version 7.2 began shipping in April, 2009. It offered the following major improvements. See the March, 2009 RATSletter for more details.
- Windows Version Runs Much Faster: Thanks to compiler improvements, the Windows version of RATS 7.2 does computations nearly twice as quickly as previous versions. Many complex estimation and simulation tasks will now take roughly half as long as before.
- 64-bit Version Available for Windows (Pro Version): The Professional version of WinRATS now ships with a 64-bit version of the program, allowing you to handle much larger data sets on systems running 64-bit XP or Vista. The 32-bit version is also still included.
- X12-ARIMA Now Available (Pro Version): Almost all features of the Census X12-ARIMA seasonal adjustment methodology have now been incorporated into the Pro version of RATS, through improvements to the X11 and BOXJENK instructions. This includes log-additive and pseudo-additive adjustments, improved handling of outliers and calendar effects, and more.
- FRED Database Access (Pro Version): Users with the Professional version 7.2 can now access the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank's FRED database directly from within RATS (requires active internet connection).
- BOXJENK Improvements: New options for RegARIMA modelling, where the emphasis is on the regression model rather than the time series model for errors. BOXJENK has been optimized to run faster, particularly with seasonal components.
- DSGE Improvements: This instruction (for Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models) has improved computational and error-checking capabilities, and a new option for exogenous shocks models.
- New Wizards: New menu-driven wizards for running unit root tests, density estimation, and non-parameteric regressions.
Version 7.1
RATS Version 7.1 began shipping in August of 2008. It added a new graphing instruction and several other improvements. See below for a brief list, or see the July, 2008 RATSletter for more details. See RATS 7.0 for details on 7.0.
- 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.
Version 7.0
Version 7.0 was a major upgrade including all new manuals. It began shipping in October, 2007. Below are some of the highlights of RATS 7.0. See the October, 2007 RATSletter and RATS 7 in Detail 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.
