Request: keep X13 UDG files or save diagnostic statistics

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Fifis
Posts: 23
Joined: Thu Jan 06, 2022 11:48 pm

Request: keep X13 UDG files or save diagnostic statistics

Postby Fifis » Mon Feb 14, 2022 3:40 am

Good afternoon!

I am writing to you with a question. I have been using EViews 12 for seasonal adjustment, and experienced an issue.

The X13 documentation specifies that a UDG diagnostic summary file can be produced, and both the HTML and ASCII versions of the official documentation mention it. It is immensely useful for easy handling of the quality statistics (M1, ..., M11) and seasonality tests (`f2.kw` and other statistics).

However, the EViews temporary folder (C:\Users\MYNAME\AppData\ev_temp) holds no such file. The series appear there, the SPD, DAT, VAR, ERR and LOG file, but no UDG.

For comparison, I called X13 using R's

Code: Select all

seasonal:::x13_run("evx13tmp", out = TRUE)

and the UDG file stayed there.

I wrote this couple of lines to extract the necessary numbers from the ASCII output, but this is quite tedious as the department in which I am working is implementing a workflow around those diagnostics.

Code: Select all

a <- readLines("EVX13TMP.out")
M.stat <- a[grepl("M\\d+ *= *", a)]
M.num <- as.numeric(gsub("^.*M\\d+ *= *", "", M.stat)) # Extracting the M statistics
Q.stat <- a[grepl("without M2", a)]
Q.num <- gsub("^.*=\\s*([0-9.]+).*", "\\1", Q.stat) # Extracting the Q2 statistic


etc.


1. Is it possible to have an option in the future release / update that would keep the easily parsable UDG file? I believe that this file will not hurt anyone if it is in the temporary directory with all the other output files.
2. Is there a handy way to load the quality and diagnostic statistics from the UDG file into EViews? I am lost because it seems arduous to do so without regular expressions.

Yours sincerely,
Andreï V. Kostyrka.
Last edited by Fifis on Tue Feb 15, 2022 4:25 am, edited 1 time in total.

EViews Gareth
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Joined: Tue Sep 16, 2008 5:38 pm

Re: Request: keep X13 UDG files or save diagnostic statistics

Postby EViews Gareth » Mon Feb 14, 2022 10:17 am

Currently EViews doesn't invoke X13 with the required -s flag to produce the UDG file. We'll change this, so that it does.
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Fifis
Posts: 23
Joined: Thu Jan 06, 2022 11:48 pm

Re: Request: keep X13 UDG files or save diagnostic statistics

Postby Fifis » Tue Feb 15, 2022 4:00 am

Dear Gareth,

I am grateful to you for the update! Looking forward to using this feature.

One more related question. Is it possible to force an evaluation of an already existing SPC specification from the dialogue window? E.g. the user can supply the `spec=name` argument to `x13` to evaluate a custom specification, and the user can create a template to be saved later in the 'Output' section. Is there a reason why not every argument of the `x13` command described in the manual can be configured manually from the window? At the very least, it would be quite handy to create one specification with multiple arguments and have the possibility to choose it manually in the dialogue. It is feasible?

Thank you very much in advance!

Yours sincerely,
Andreï V. Kostyrka

EViews Gareth
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Re: Request: keep X13 UDG files or save diagnostic statistics

Postby EViews Gareth » Tue Feb 15, 2022 10:59 am

I'm not sure I follow.
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EViews Gareth
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Re: Request: keep X13 UDG files or save diagnostic statistics

Postby EViews Gareth » Tue Feb 15, 2022 4:09 pm

Today's patch produces the udg file now.
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