From left: Dr Nazri, Dr Mahmud and Dr Krishna
The Centre for Accounting, Banking and Finance (CABF) under the Faculty of Business and Finance (FBF) organised a research talk titled “GRETL for Econometric Analysis” at Kampar Campus on 9 November 2016. The talk was delivered by Dr Ahmad Nazri bin Wahidudin, an Assistant Professor from FBF who specialises in the fields of Asset Securitisation in Commercial Banks, Asset-backed Securities (ABS), Mortgage-backed Securities (MBS) and Islamic Finance.
The talk was aimed to enlighten UTAR staff with the use of GRETL, an open-source statistical analysis package written in C programming language and used mainly for econometrics. Also present at the talk were FBF Deputy Dean for R&D and Postgraduate Programmes Dr Mahmud bin Hj Abd Wahab and Chairperson of CABF Dr Krishna Moorthy Manicka Nadar.
Participants, which consisted of FBF academics, benefitted enormously from the information and technical knowledge relating to the software. Dr Nazri commenced his talk by introducing GRETL as a free regression and econometrics package which is an alternative to licensed software. The speaker then elucidated on technical information of the GRETL software.
He explained, “The GRETL abbreviation stands for GNU Regression, Econometrics and Time-Series Library. GNU is a Unix-like operating system and is a cross-platform software package that creates its own graphical user interface (GUI) for econometric analysis. GNU is a free software that anyone can redistribute and modify under the terms of the General Public License (GNU) as published by the Free Software Foundation. The software is also user friendly and menu driven, though certain complex analyses need written commands to execute the data analyses.”
Dr Nazri explaining about the data files
In addition to that, Dr Nazri also enlightened the participants on the working features of GRETL. In his discussion, he expounded, “Data transformation can be easily done through the menu toolbar for an analysis to be carried out. In addition, a data import can be done by dragging and dropping into a session work window. At the same time all other features available in licensed software are also available in GRETL, such as non-parametric tests, summary of descriptive statistics, boxplot, Q-Q plot and others.”
At the end of the talk, Dr Nazri demonstrated the use of GRETL with some model data. The talk ended with an interesting interactive Q&A session.
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