Gretl is a Business software package developed by Allin Cottrell, Riccardo Lucchetti and the gretl team. The cross-platform, open-source software package is designed for econometric analysis.

Analysis For Statistics And Econometrics Data

Gretl is an acronym for Gnu Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library. It is coded in C language and users are free to redistribute it, as well as add or modify the software package contents. Users still have to comply with the GNU General Public License (GPL) as stated by the Free Software Foundation.

Packaged With Forecasting Tools

Gretl is created to lighten the load of every statistician and econometrician. It has an easy to use interface with support to several languages commonly used today. The software package comes with a lot of estimator functions such as GMM; single-equation, least squares, maximum likelihood, and system methods. This allows inferring of an unknown parameter value plotted in a statistical model. Users are also provided with time series indexing methods like ARIMA, univariate GARCH-type models, Kalman filter, structural VARs and VECMs, unit-root and cointegration tests. This enables indexing data in time order. It includes limited dependent variables like interval regression, logit, models for count and duration data, probit, sample selection, and tobit. This allows estimating the connection between the limited dependent variable being observed and other variables requires methods with set parameters. The software package has panel-data estimators allow for consistent estimation of the observed explanatory variables’ effects as well as cross-section units. This includes GMM-based dynamic panel models, instrumental variables and probit. This software package can process output models like LaTeX files. The output models are plotted in an equation or tabular format.

Open Source Features

Gretl’s main advantage over other software package is its capacity to be integrated with several add-ons and contributed function packages made by other users. This will enrich everybody’s experience when analyzing data from statistics and econometrics. The software package is built with a custom, integrated scripting language called hansl, an acronym for Hansl's A Neat Scripting Language. hansl is an interpreted scripting language that automates repetitive tasks so that users can easily make procedures implementing techniques and special functions that could be absent in gretl. Similar to standard scripting languages, it has data structures with conditionals and complex features, along with loops. It also natively supports matrices as primitive variable types. Some of the function packages and other add-ons for gretl are written in hansl. Other than hansl, it includes more programming tools as well as matrix operations. 

Compatibility With Other Statistical Tools

To process statistics and econometrics easier, the software package has a GUI controller so that users can create fine-tuned Gnuplot graphs. Users can expect a more convenient facilitation of data and result exchange with other programming languages like GNU R, GNU, Julia, Octave, Ox, Python, and Stata. The software platform allows parallelization via MPI, as well as support for Mixed Data Sampling approach (MIDAS) mixed time-series frequencies and Library for Support Vector Machines (LIBSVM) machine learning library.

Helping Statistician And Econometricians