My Platform for Econometrics

• Fedora Core is my operating system
• R for simple data manipulation, summary statistics, simple regressions
• List of all packages
• Computational econometrics packages:linear regression models, microeconometrics, nonparametric methods, linear models for panel data, GMM, time series, etc.
• Optimization and Mathematical Programming
• Empirical Finance
• Contributed documentation(manuals)
• Java for everything else where speed is important: estimation of demand, dynamic games
  • java.sun.com for Java foundation (compiler, libraries, executor)
  • Parallel Colt is a multithreaded version of Colt - a library for high performance scientific computing in Java. It contains efficient algorithms for data analysis, linear algebra, multi-dimensional arrays, Fourier transforms, and statistics.
  • JAMA for matrix library
  • Ports of Fortran optimization libraries (UNCMIN, MINPACK) at FPL Statistics Group
  • IPOPT -optimizer for large scale optimization problems (including constraint optimization problems)
  • The Apache Commons Mathematics Library - It contains classes for numerical analysis, statistics, optimization, graphics, etc.
• MySQL for advanced data manipulation and large databases. It works very well with R and Java.
• Stata for simple regressions when I do not have R

Why R?

• Cost: Free!
• Superior graphics
• Object orientation
• Reproducibility
• Excellent programming support

Why Java?

• Cost: Free!
• Excellent documentation
• Object-oriented
• Automatic memory allocation
• Dynamic optimization of execution paths
• Designed from day one to be networked, multithreaded, write-once-run-anywhere cross-platform