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Gretl Econometric Software in Turkish

What is Gretl?

Gretl (Gnu Regression, Econometrics, and Time-series Library) is a comprehensive and cross-platform software package for econometric analysis developed with the C programming language. It is free and open-source. One can freely redistribute it or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) as published by the Free Software Foundation. Being free makes the program ideal for the classroom environment, while being open-source software makes it a reliable and preferable choice for research in line with the principles of transparency and universality in scientific studies.

Since its modest beginnings in 2000, gretl has shown a significant progress and today it has reached over 380,000 source lines of code (SLOC). The newest versions of the program offer, in addition to an easy and intuitive user interface, a wide selection of tests and estimators, an integrated scripting language, high quality plots and many other advanced features. According to the ohloh web site, which compiles statistics regarding various open source software projects, gretl has currently ten active developers and contains approximately 100 human years worth of effort based on its SLOC count. Consequently, gretl's value is calculated as over 5 million US dollars on the basis of required resources to write the project from scratch by a hired team of programmers with an average salary of 55,000 dollars per year. You can find the gretl web site here, while ohloh's gretl report page can be found here.

My Contributions to Gretl

I started using gretl for the first time during my economics doctoral studies and over time I have become one of its developers. In the last several years, aside from having contributions in a large number of improvements and error corrections, I have played a role in the testing and documentation of the numerical accuracy of gretl's linear and non-linear regression, univariate and multivariate summary statistics, ANOVA, statistical distributions and ARMA functionalities. With A. Y. Yalta, I published in 2007 a review of the program in the Journal of Applied Econometrics. Stored in the JAE Data Archive as a part of this study, you can access the technical supplement which contains detailed information on the numerical accuracy of gretl version 1.6.0. Also, gretl is among the programs examined in my study dealing with the Box-Jenkins methodology from the econometric computation perspective, which has been recently published in International Journal of Forecasting. You can find the full text of this article here. Finally, my new paper entitled "Wilkinson Tests and Gretl," in which I assess the various basic statistical functions of gretl can be found here.

In 2008, I meticulously translated gretl's user interface and its web site into Turkish. To accomplish this, I surveyed the various existing Turkish econometrics texts and prepared a detailed econometric terminology renditions list. When there were multiple alternatives for a single term proposed by different authors, in order to choose the most suitable Turkish translation, I consulted with Dr. Eyüp Bacanlı from the TOBB ETU Department of Turkish Language and Literature as well as various native English speaker esteemed academicians with many years of dedication to the field of econometrics such as Fordham University Department of Economics faculty member Professor H. D. Vinod and Wake Forest University Economics Department Chair and the principal gretl developer Professor Allin Cottrell. Aside from being correct in terms of meaning and grammar, the resulting translation is also internally consistent. With this work, gretl has become the first econometric software to support the Turkish language.

As can be seen from the screenshot below, the gretl econometric program in Turkish also makes it possible the correct and high quality Turkish graphics and output suitable for publication in scientific journals. I am hoping that gretl will not only be useful to many Turkish scientists in their studies, but also contribute to the Turkish language to develop and become widespread as a language of science. You can access several other screenshots of gretl in Turkish here.

Finally, I have been one of the organization committee members of the International gretl Conferance, which took place in May 28-29, 2009 at the Bilbao Basque Country University in Spain. For their extraordinary efforts in regards to perfectly organizing the conference and making it a great success, many thanks in particular to Ignacio Díaz-Emparanza and Petr Mariel. You can access the conference web site here, while the open access conference proceedings can be found here.

A. Talha YALTA 2008 - 2009 (CC-by-SA-3.0)