The RATS Software Forum

I realised that MCGraph does not have a stylenum option. Is there any other way to incorporate changes in patterns of graphs under this command? I want to distinguish the color and pattern of confidence bands from the responses in MCGraphIRF.

The responses use style 1, which is solid black whether in color or B&W, and the error bands use style 2, which is solid blue in color and a on-off dash pattern in B&W. You can redefine either or both of those styles. If you're looking for something much more complicated than that, you would need to use @MCPROCESSIRF to process the information and construct the graphs with the desired options.

Just following the instructions on the referred page. I dont know if this works with montevar command. Is this the right way to do it?

OPEN DATA "E:\phd\research\RATS\bubble_basic.xls"
CALENDAR(Q) 1984:2
DATA(FORMAT=XLS,ORG=COLUMNS) 1984:02 2007:04 y d p lp sp hp m2 comm_e comm_ne int_rate lp_nd lp_nb nltl $
npa nltl_1 nltl_exp nim

open styles thicklines.txt
grparm(import=styles)

system(model=varmodel)
variables y d p comm_ne lp sp
lags 1 to 2
det constant
end(system)
estimate
@VARLagSelect(lags=8, crit=aic)
# y d p comm_ne lp_nb sp
@VARLagSelect(lags=8, crit=sbc)
# y d p comm_ne lp_nb sp
@VARIRF(model=varmodel,steps=8,page=byshocks)
@montevar(draws=20000, model=varmodel)

Will it apply? Yes. To the B&W representation. It redefines line styles 1 and 2 for black and white. (It also defines 3 and 4, which aren't used). Whether is does what you want is questionable. That defines style 2 as a light gray line (.9 is the level of "grayness" where 0 is black and 1 is white) which will barely show up in a 6 x 6 table of graphs. What are you trying to do different from the standard?

I want to replace the solid blue lines of the confidence bands with dashed blue or red lines. How do I achieve this? And can we have more examples on how to customise these things. Its not at all clear from the refferred page.

This will keep the solid black for style 1, while thickening it a bit and use a dotted red line for style 2.

line_color_1=0,000000,3 ;* Solid black thick
line_color_2=1,FF0000,3 ;* Dotted red thick

If you want blue, the second argument would be 0000FF (100% blue) rather than FF0000 (100% red). If you want dashes (equal length on and off but with longer lines and gaps), you would change the first argument to a 2. That probably won't work as well as the dots when you do a 6 x 6 matrix---you lose the detail when the segments are too long relative to the size of the graph.

It's not a heavily-used feature, so we don't have a lot of examples.