BAMP Manual
Manual
Detailed information on the software, the data and the output can be found in Schmid, Held: Bayesian Age-Period-Cohort Modeling and Prediction - BAMP, Journal of Statistical Software, Vol. 21, Issue 8, Oct 2007. This page gives a short summary of the basic information.
Windows user: Please see below.
Quick steps
After you have installed BAMP, edit the bamp.ini file or write your own ini-file. Then start the program by typing
bamp ini-file
or (if you use bamp.ini) just type
bamp
On window-based OS you can also start BAMP with a double click on the BAMP-icon. BAMP then will use the bamp.ini file
Input-Files
BAMP needs inputfiles with the population data and the number of deaths. Both files have to be matrices of number of agegroups x number of periods (or transposed, see dataorder). The data has to be seperated by blanks.
Predictions
If you want to get predictions of future deathrates, set predictions to 1. Set number of predictions to the number of periods for which you want the predictions. If you also have population projection, set predictions to 3.
In order to test the model you can also make prediction for existing data. Then the input files must include this data, the matrices have to be of order number of agegroups x (number of periods + number of predictions). Set deviance to 2 and BAMP will calculate the deviance for the predicted periods.
We recommend to convert bamp.ini to unix format using dos2unix after editing the file with WordPad. Unpack dos2unix to the bamp folder. After editing and saving bamp.ini, drop the bamp.ini file on the dos2unix icon. After this, BAMP should run smoothly on all Windows versions.