Introduction to RATS

The object of this section is to get you up and running as quickly as possible. The first thing to do is to get your program installed. If you haven’t done that, and need some help with it, see "Installing RATS".

Once you’re ready to go, you should start working through the Introduction to RATS examples, particularly Example One, which introduces the critical concept of the Input and Output windows. These examples introduce you to how RATS gets information from you and supplies results to you. We provide several examples designed to give you a taste of what you can do with the program. To allow you to find your own pace, we have kept the examples fairly short; just long enough for each to introduce a few key concepts. The main discussion in each is intended to be followed in sequence—what’s discussed in one is assumed in the next. However, each of the examples is followed by one or more “Learn More” subsections. These you can skip on first reading, particularly if you’re never used a statistical package like RATS before.

These “Learn More” segments do include information that you will probably need eventually, so you probably will want to come back to them eventually. If you are very proficient at working with statistical languages, then you might want to go through these the first time, since many of the ideas are shared with other such programs.

Conventions Used in the Help and Manuals

We use the following font and style conventions in the RATS help and manuals:

Examples	Examples that can executed as written are presented indented from the text in Courier font. For example: linreg(define=req) rate 1960:1 1995:8 resids_rate # constant ip grm2 grppi{1}
Instructions	Instructions are the fundamental building blocks of the RATS language—they instruct RATS to perform an action. In the example above, the instruction LINREG performs a linear regression. In body text, instruction names are presented in uppercase bold Courier font. For example BOXJENK and DATA.
Parameters	Parameters are used to provide additional information to an instruction, such as the series names rate and resids_rate in the example above. When describing instructions, the names of the available parameters are presented in lower case italicized Courier. For example, start, end, series.
Options	Options are used to modify how instructions behave. In the sample above, DEFINE defines an equation. In body text, options are presented in uppercase non-bolded Courier font (such as DATES and PRINT).
Variable Names	Variables (series, matrices, scalars, and so on) are generally presented in uppercase Courier, such as RATE and IP. In some cases, mixed-case names are used for readability.