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Examples

Examples are invaluable for new users who hope to get up and running quickly with statsmodels, and they are extremely useful to those who wish to explore new features of statsmodels. We hope to provide documentation and tutorials for as many models and use-cases as possible!

Most user-contributed examples/tutorials/recipes should be placed on the statsmodels examples wiki page That wiki page is freely editable. Please post your cool tricks, examples, and recipes on there!

If you would rather have your example file officially accepted to the statsmodels distribution and posted on this website, you will need to go through the normal patch submission process.

File Format

Examples are simple runnable python scripts that go in the top-level examples directory. We use the ipython_directive for Sphinx to convert them automatically to reStructuredText and html at build time.

Each line of the script is executed; both the python code and the printed results are shown in the output file. Lines that are commented out using the hash symbol # are rendered as reST markup.

Comments: “True” comments that should not appear in the output file should be written on lines that start with #...

Error handling: Syntax errors in pure Python will raise an error during the build process. If you need to show a SyntaxError, an alternative would be to provide a verbatim copy of an IPython session encased in a ReST code block instead of pure Python code.

Suppressing lines: To suppress a line in the built documentation, follow it with a semicolon.

Figures: To save a figure, prepend the line directly before the plotting command with #@savefig file_name.png width=4in, for example. You do not need to call show or close.

IPython magics: You can use IPython magics by writing a line like this: #%timeit X = np.empty((1000,1000)).

Make Life Easier

To save you some time and to make the new examples nicely fit into the existing ones consider the following points.

Look at examples source code to get a feel for how statsmodels examples should look like.

PEP8 syntax checker install a [PEP8] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pep8 syntax checker for you editor. It will not only make your code look nicer but also serves as pre-debugger. Note that some of doc directives explained above imply pep8 violations. Also, for the sake of readability it’s a local convention not to add white spaces around power operators, e.g. x * 2 + y**2 + z.

build docs run make html from the docs directory to see how your example looks in the fully rendered html pages.

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