RATS

Contents:

Availability

Unix: RATS 5.01 is installed on skew3. The "CATS" and X11 add-ons are not part of our license.

MS Windows: Kellogg does not hold a RATS license for MS Windows. See the vendor's web site for pricing information.

RATS (Regression Analysis of Time Series) is an econometric software package for time series analysis.

Vendor information

Estima
800 Sherman Ave, Suite 301
Evanston, IL 60201
E-mail: estima@estima.com Phone:

Support

• See the Estima Tech Support site: www.estima.com/techindx.htm
• Phone: (847) 864-1910

Running RATS

To run RATS interactively, type "rats" at the Unix prompt. You will see the RATS command prompt, "?". To end the session, type "end".

To submit a RATS batch job, use the following command at the Unix prompt:

where "input_file.prg" is the name of the file containing the RATS instructions and “output_file.out” is the file where you want the output to be stored. Note that if "output_file.out" already exists, it will be overwritten.

Graphics in RATS:

By default, RATS tries to show graphics on X Windows. If you are running it through X-Win32, then RATS will open windows for the graphics, unless the default is over ridden.

If running RATS through a telnet session, RATS will send an error message to screen for each graphic selected. The error message is the following:

## X19. Unable to open X Window for display

To be able to manipulate the graphics (for a working paper, for example), we suggest the following:

1. Send the graphics to a file. Before any GRAPH or SCATTER command, use the OPEN PLOT command. For example, to send all your graphics to a file called "results.rgf", the command would read:

   open plot results.rgf

   Before the file name, a complete path for the file might be included. Examples:

   open plot mywork/results.rgf

2. Avoid the display of graphics completely. To do so, add the following line at the beginning of your RATS program file:

   environment noshowgraphs

   Or:

   env noshowgraphs

   Otherwise, RATS will try to open graphics windows to display the graphs. Under X-Win32, as long as the graphics windows are closed, the output and graphics file will not be written. Telnet users will get the error mentioned above (although the graphics and output files will be created).

3. Use one of the RATS provided utilities to transform the graphic into a different format. RATS provides a UNIX based utility, "rgf2pst", that can transform the .rgf to a postscript file. Simply run the following command from the UNIX prompt:

   rgf2pst results.rgf results.ps

   where "results.rgf" is the original graphics file and "results.ps" is the file with the graphics translated into postscript. The conversion from RATS graphics format to standard postscript also translates the different colors in the graph to patterns in the postscript file, making it more suitable for printing.

Examples and solutions

RATS procedures and examples, from Estima

Manuals available at Research Computing

Online manuals at Kellogg (version 5)

• RATS User's Guide, version 5
• RATS Reference Manual, version 5
• RATS User's Manual 4.0
• RATS version 4.2 User's Manual Supplement
• RATS version 4.3 User's Manual Supplement

Useful links

• A RATS "Tour", from Estima
• RATS-L, the RATS listserv