Getting Started with RATS

If you are new, or fairly new, to RATS, we recommend that you read through at least the first part of the Introduction to RATS, and work through some of the examples presented there. This will introduce you to many of the most important RATS instructions, and will give you a general idea of how to use the program. The process by which RATS gets input and produces output is described in RATS Editor (Interactive Mode).

You can learn more about specific topics in the Statistics and Algorithms, Graphics and Programming Tools sections and find more details on all of the RATS instructions and functions.

We recommend that you follow the same basic steps in your own programs that we use in our examples in the Introduction to RATS. In general, these are the following:

1.Either use a Data Wizard to read your data, or type in the appropriate CALENDAR, ALLOCATE, OPEN DATA and DATA instructions. The New Project wizard can be particularly useful when you have a single data file as your data source.

2.Examine your data (using toolbar icons, the View menu operations, and instructions like PRINT or GRAPH, etc.) to make sure that you've brought it in correctly.

3.Do any preliminary transformations (with SET, DIFFERENCE, etc. or the corresponding wizards)

4.Do your analysis using the point-and-click wizards, or by typing in the appropriate Estimation Instructions, Hypothesis Testing instructions, and so on (see List of Instructions for a complete listing of categories).

5.If you want to view scalar or array variables (e.g. user-defined variables or Regression Variables set by estimation instructions), use DISPLAY (for scalars) and WRITE for arrays. Use PRINT to display data series.

6.You can produce time series graphs and scatter plots with the GRAPH, SCATTER, and related instructions.

7.If you need to output data to a file, you can use DEDIT and related instructions (for RATS format file only) or OPEN COPY and COPY (for a variety of file formats). You can also do View—Series Window and File—Export... to export series.

The menu-driven Wizards particularly helpful when first learning the program, but you will eventually want to learn to use the commands directly as well. Once you are familiar with the RATS language, you will probably find it easier to just type in the commands yourself in many situations.