Dear Dynare friends,
We are pleased to announce the release of Dynare 6.5. This maintenance
release fixes various bugs. The Windows, macOS, MATLAB online and
source packages are available for download at the Dynare website [1].
This release is compatible with MATLAB versions ranging from 9.5
(R2018b) to 25.2 (R2025b), and with GNU Octave versions ranging from
7.1.0 to 10.3.0 (NB: the Windows package requires version 10.3.0
specifically).
Here is a list of the problems identified in version 6.4 and that have
been fixed in version 6.5:
* Several issues in the nonlinear solver, used in e.g. numerical
steady state
computations, were fixed:
it only directly accepted initial values equal to the solution if
the
Jacobian contained NaN or Inf; otherwise, the numerical solver was
uselessly startedit erroneously accepted initial guesses with
complex values when
randomizing the starting pointit erroneously accepted initial
guesses that contained Inf
* Optimization would, in rare cases, erroneously apply an infinite
penalty
function value
* In rare cases, the multivariate diffuse Kalman filter/smoother
(kalman_algo=3) did not correctly exit the diffuse stage
* The following problems with the estimation command were fixed:
the point forecasts triggered by the forecast option did not take
shock
uncertainty into accountthe
keep_kalman_algo_if_singularity_is_detected option did not work as
advertised (option will be removed in Dynare 7)the EndTemperature
suboption of the mode_compute=10 option (“simpsa”) was
brokenthe mh_posterior_mode_estimation option was broken in
conjunction with
the method_of_moments commandthe nodecomposition option did not
suppress all variance decompositionsthe
posterior_sampling_method='slice' option did not save all files in
the correct folderthe mh_recover option did not work correctly in
conjunction with the
posterior_sampling_method='slice' and
posterior_sampler_options=('save_tmp_file', 1) optionsthe results of
mode-finding were not correctly stored in
oo_.posterior_mode for shock and measurement error correlations
* The following problems with non-linear filters were fixed:
the manual incorrectly stated that 1,000 instead of 5,000 particles
was
the defaultthe estimation command did not allow the pruning option
to be set for
higher-order estimationcombining options filter_algorithm=cpf and
proposal_approximation=montecarlo of the estimation command returned
incorrect resultsthe suboptions 'unscented_beta' and
'unscented_kappa' of the
particle_filter_options option of the estimation command did not
accept
values of 0the filter_algorithm=gf and filter_algorithm=gmf options
of the
estimation command did not correctly handle correlated measurement
error
* The confidence bands of classical forecasts had incorrect coverage
* Several issues with the forecast command used with exogenous
deterministic
variables (declared with the varexo_det command) were fixed:
without measurement errors, it would store the upper bound of the
confidence
interval in the HPDinf field and the lower bound in the HPDsup
fieldwith multiple measurement errors it would crash if not all
observables were
requested as outputsit would assign the output to the wrong variable
names if a variable list
was specified after the command
* The discretionary_policy command did not accept the
planner_discount_latex_name option, contrary to what the
documentation says
* The outfile option of the smoother2histval command would produce an
incorrect file on models with two lags or more, leading to incorrect
results
when loading that file with the histval_file command
* OccBin would occasionally crash upon encountering invalid parameter
vectors
* The example1_reporting.mod example file was broken
As a reminder, the list of new features introduced in versions 6.x can
be found in the release notes for
6.0 [2].
On behalf of the Dynare Team,
--
Sébastien Villemot
Economist at CEPREMAP
Co-leader of the Dynare project
https://sebastien.villemot.name
[1] the Dynare website https://www.dynare.org/download/
[2] release notes for 6.0
https://www.dynare.org/new-dynare-release/dynare-6.0-released/
