Steps for Downloading and Installing TSP software



Steps for Downloading, Installing and Running TSP software

Econ 141, Spring 2002

(By Mark Rodini)

This document gives the steps for downloading and installing TSP onto your Windows PC. It is derived from my experiences, and so does not discuss all of the various options of components you can install. Furthermore, as I have never attempted it on a Mac, at this point I do not discuss how to put TSP up on a Mac –though it is probably fairly similar.

Downloading:

In order to download for free you must be in the Berkeley domain, otherwise you must buy the software (for >$500). Being in the Berkeley domain means that you are either logged in on a computer on campus (with a uclink, socrates, stat, compsci, econ or whatever account). Alternatively, you can download from home, provided you have dialed into the university system though a Berkeley Internet Kit, or whatever internet service provider package you might have from Berkeley. To dial into Berkeley, I presume you will have to have a uclink, socrates or whatever account.

I dialed from home on a slow old modem, and the whole TSP package took about one hour to download during the busiest part of the day. The package consists of 5 files amounting to about 11 megabytes. A better way might be to download it to your account while on campus, since it has high-speed lines, and to write the programs to a ZIP disk or burn it to a CD. Then you can carry it home and install it directly from the ZIP or CD. However, I confess that I do not know what sort of high capacity drives are available in the general use computer labs on campus. (You may also be able to e-mail it to yourself, as a last resort.)

To find the program, go to and look for the TSP links near the top left side of the webpage. Find a link called TSP 4.5 with GiveWIN Interface and double-click on it; (Not the link to TSP Through the Looking Glass). There is also, we have been told, a link from Prof. Hall’s website, however when I tried it, it failed to find the page.

You will be brought to a page with five files with the following names (and sizes): GiveWin130.exe (1870 Kb), install.exe (132 Kb), TSP450.exe (7860 Kb), TSPGiveWin450.exe (3369 Kb), and install.txt (3 Kb). Download all of them! You will also want to double-click on install.txt to read it. It gives the installation instructions, including a registration code you will need.

To download –if you don’t know how already. From Internet Explorer, if you double-click on the .EXE files, it will automatically ask if you want to save them to a file. Click OK and provide the folder on your computer (or on your ZIP) where you want to put them. (I created a folder called c:\Program Files\TSP 4.5 and put them there.)

How to Install

You should now have these five files on your hard drive or on a ZIP or CD. To install the whole package, follow these steps:

Step 1) Double-click on install.exe and this will walk you through the whole process. A window will appear with three options: “Install stand-alone TSP”, “Install GiveWin”, “Install TSP for GiveWin”. We will go through all of these.

Step 2) Double-click on “Install stand-alone TSP”, and the set-up wizard will kick in. At a certain point it will ask where you want to put the files. I put them in the same folder as I indicate above. Click “OK”, and it will then ask you at some point to enter your name, company and serial number. Type your name; for company I typed UCB, and for serial number, I used the registration code provided in the install.txt file. At another point it will ask what type of TSP you want: “typical”, “minimal”, or “custom”. Choose “typical”, and go on. That’s pretty much it. You will find the initial install window from Step 1 still on your screen.

At this point you can technically stop, and you will have on your computer the non-GiveWin version of TSP. But, we will continue and install the newer GiveWin version.

Step 3) On the original install window, move down to the second option and double-click on “Install GiveWin”. You will again be asked for your name and company. Again enter your name and type UCB. You will be asked for the registration number. Again, use the number given in the install.txt file. (Failure to use this exact registration code will cause the installation to fail. I have actually found on the stand-alone version you can enter any code you want, but here it matters.) Move through the rest of the process, which should be self-explanatory. You will still continue to find the initial install window from Step 1 on your screen.

Step 4) Now let’s install the last component from the original install window. Double-click on “Install TSP for GiveWin”. As above, you will be asked to enter your name, company and registration. Enter the same stuff as above. I believe that this set-up also asks you where you would like to put the GiveWin program. You can put it where you like, or accept the default.

Step 5) That’s it! Once this last part is installed, you can click on “exit” at the bottom of the original install window.

Starting TSP

The set-up process creates a number of “shortcuts” on your start menu and desktop. The basic versions of TSP can be run by clicking on the shortcuts that say either “TSP 4.5” or “TSP Win32 4.5”. This will start TSP in old DOS-looking windows. What is the difference between them? Beats me! The shortcut “through the Looking Glass” starts up a window that is apparently intended to help you create batch programs in TSP. There is also a shortcut for “TSP help system”. This needs no explanation.

Lastly, you will find a shortcut called “GiveWin”. Click on this and a window will pop up and will instruct you to enter the registration code, and where to enter it. Again, enter the code you used above.

Whew! Congratulations, you are ready to go. Go where? The rest of this document will give you ideas on how to get going.

The window in front of you should have the name “results”. To actually start TSP from GiveWin, go to the drag down menu button called “Modules” and click on “Start TSP”. Yet another window will pop up asking where you want to put the work files. These are dataset and other files that TSP will create as you do your work. The work folder you specify will be delete upon exiting from TSP. After entering where you want the work files to go, or after accepting the default, a window will appear with the name “TSP Session”, and you will see a TSP prompt, a “?”. A black graphics window will also appear outside of the GiveWin interface. TSP commands are entered at the prompt.

To exit TSP and GiveWin, type “quit” (without the quotes) at the prompt.

Getting Started

Here, I will explain how to get going using election data from the first problem set.

Interactive versus batch: There are two ways to use any statistical package. Interactive simply means that you will do your work command-by-command entered one at a time at the TSP prompt. Batch, as the name implies, is when you write a program (in a text editor) that consists of TSP commands, and then sumbit the program in full. The more skilled you become, and the longer the programs you have, the more attractive batch becomes. TSP commands in batch end with a semi-colon; they do not in interactive mode. The manuals tend to be geared towards batch, so keep this in mind.

Let’s begin working with data. Start up (interactive) TSP to get the prompt.

Entering data: Data can be entered either directly or from a file. We will do it directly here, but in the future, you will bring data in from a file. One peculiarity of TSP is that you must first tell it the “frequency” of the data (annual, monthly, quarterly, none). A second peculiarity is that you must tell it how big the sample is. Let’s use the data from the first problem set. There are two variables we will call GDP and PLURAL (for GDP and plurality of the vote). The data are technically a time series, but we will ignore that and treat them as a cross-section of numbers; thus we will set the FREQ to none (“n”). To enter the data, use the command ENTER, and give the name of the series you want to enter data for. You will then be prompted to enter data until the size indicated by SMPL has been reached. Do this for both GDP and PLURAL as shown below. By the way, TSP is not case-sensitive. If you screw up, type “clear” and start over. Note that I have entered plurality as a decimal percent to avoid confusion later.

==========

? freq n frequency=none

? smpl 1,13 we have 13 observations

? enter gdp command to input gdp data

“Enter data for GDP” (a TSP message)

1 ? .013 enter first gdp observation

2 ? .001 and so on

…

13 ? .021

“GDP has been stored with 13 observations” (a TSP message)

? enter plural command to input plurality

“Enter data for PLURAL” (a TSP message)

1 ? .42 enter first plural obs

2 ? .60 and so on

…

13 ? .50

“PLURAL has been stored with 13 observations” (a TSP message)

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Now, let’s play with the data. Try these commands yourself. Many of the commands have options that allow them to do more things than what I show here. Check the manual or help system to see what else they do.

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? show gdp,plural describes data

? print gdp,plural writes the data to the screen

? msd plural,gdp displays some sample stats

? hist gdp plots a histogram

? graph gdp plural should look familiar

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Let’s stop with a basic regression of plurality on gdp. The model we will run is of the following equation: PLURAL = a*GDP + c, and we want to estimate parameters a and c, the intercept and slope, respectively.

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? olsq plural,c,gdp runs least squares regression

? graph gdp plural @fit overlays regression line

===========

The output of the olsq command, among other things, shows the estimated coefficients. In particular, the slope is about 1.92, suggesting that a one percentage point rise in GDP growth is associated with a 1.92 percentage point rise in incumbent plurality. (Though note that the coefficient is not statistically significant at conventional levels.)

That concludes the basic lesson, though you can play around with it more if you like. We will talk about entering data from a file, saving results and running batch programs later.

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