Troubleshooting
Because the logl object provides a great deal of flexibility, you are more likely to experience problems with estimation using the logl object than with EViews’ built-in estimators.
If you are experiencing difficulties with estimation the following suggestions may help you in solving your problem:
• . A simple error involving a wrong sign can easily stop the estimation process from working. You should also verify that the parameters of the model are really identified (in some specifications you may have to impose a normalization across the parameters). Also, every parameter which appears in the model must feed directly or indirectly into the likelihood contributions. The view is particularly useful in helping you spot the latter problem.
• . If any of the likelihood contributions in your sample cannot be evaluated due to missing values or because of domain errors in mathematical operations (logs and square roots of negative numbers, division by zero, etc.) the estimation will stop immediately with the message: “Cannot compute @logl due to missing values”. In other cases, a bad choice of starting values may lead you into regions where the likelihood function is poorly behaved. You should always try to initialize your parameters to sensible numerical values. If you have a simpler estimation technique available which approximates the problem, you may wish to use estimates from this method as starting values for the maximum likelihood specification.
• . In contrast to most other estimation routines in EViews, the logl estimation procedure will not automatically drop observations with NAs or lags from the sample when estimating a log likelihood model. If your likelihood specification involves lags, you will either have to drop observations from the beginning of your estimation sample, or you will have to carefully code the specification so that missing values from before the sample do not cause NAs to propagate through the entire sample (see the AR(1) and GARCH examples for a demonstration).
Since the series used to evaluate the likelihood are contained in your workfile (unless you use the @temp statement to delete them), you can examine the values in the log likelihood and intermediate series to find problems involving lags and missing values.
• . If you are using analytic derivatives, use the view to make sure you have coded the derivatives correctly. If you are using numerical derivatives, consider specifying analytic derivatives or adjusting the options for derivative method or step size.
• . If you are having problems with parameter values causing mathematical errors, you may wish to consider reparameterizing the model to restrict the parameter within its valid domain. See the discussion below for examples.
Most of the error messages you are likely to see during estimation are self-explanatory. The error message “near singular matrix” may be less obvious. This error message occurs when EViews is unable to invert the matrix of the sum of the outer product of the derivatives so that it is impossible to determine the direction of the next step of the optimization. This error may indicate a wide variety of problems, including bad starting values, but will almost always occur if the model is not identified, either theoretically, or in terms of the available data.