setting_things_up

Setting up the BEARX environment

• Cloning the repositories
• Opening the GUI
• Opening a GUI example

The BEARX repositories can be set up on your computer either from a system shell or from within Matlab. The instructions below use Matlab because this approach works the same way regardless of the operating system.

Cloning the repositories

Here, we will clone the BEARX Toolbox repository and the BEARX GUI Examples repositories locally. The latter repository contains a number of example model folders, and is optional.

Step 1. Open Matlab, and switch to a folder of your choice in which you want to keep the BEARX environment (using either the cd command or the path bar at the top of the Matlab IDE).

Step 2. Clone the BEARX Toolbox repository and the BEARX GUI Examples repository next to each other:

!git clone https://github.com/OGResearch/BEARX-Toolbox
!git clone https://github.com/OGResearch/BEARX-GUI-Examples

(The ! prefix tells Matlab to execute the command in the system shell.)

Step 3. Add the BEARX Toolbox to the Matlab path:

addpath BEARX-Toolbox -end; bearPaths

The bearPaths function adds all necessary BEARX subfolders to the Matlab path.

Opening the GUI

Once the BEARX paths are added to Matlab, you can create your own model folder, switch to that folder, and open the GUI two different ways:

• gui.start will create a fresh GUI environment, erasing any previous information configured by the user (e.g. the type of the BVAR model, specification of tasks that are to be executed, etc.). Any user files, including data files, are preserved.

• gui.resume will simply open an existing session where the user left it previously.

Opening a GUI example

Switch to the BEARX GUI example folder of your choice. We recommend starting with PlainTimeInvariant, which demonstrates a basic time-invariant Bayesian VAR setup.

cd BEARX-GUI-Examples/PlainTimeInvariant

Because the BEARX GUI Examples repository comes with a prefilled model specification in each folder, we recommend using the gui.resume command to open the existing configuration rather than gui.start.

Follow the step-by-step guide to see how the GUI works.