About this blog
Rick Wicklin, PhD, is a senior researcher in computational statistics at SAS and is a principal developer of PROC IML and SAS/IML Studio. His areas of expertise include computational statistics, statistical graphics, and modern methods in statistical data analysis. Rick is author of the book Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software.
Follow @RickWicklin on Twitter.
Multithreaded = more productive
When I write SAS/IML programs, I usually do my development in the SAS/IML Studio environment. Why? There are many reasons, but the one that I will discuss today is the fact that the application is multithreaded and supports multiple programming workspaces. The advantages of multiple programming workspaces I am always [...]
Post a Comment Bias and covariance explained to an 11-year-old
I was inspired by Chris Hemedinger’s blog posts about his daughter’s science fair project. Explaining statistics to a pre-teenager can be a humbling experience. My 11-year-old son likes science. He recently set about trying to measure which of three projectile launchers is the most accurate. I think he wanted to [...]
Post a Comment A parametric view of love
If you tell my wife that she’s married to a statistical geek, she’ll nod knowingly. She is used to hearing sweet words of affection such as You are more beautiful than Euler’s identity. or My love for you is like the exponential function: increasing, unbounded, and transcendental. But those are [...]
Post a Comment Divide and count: A test for spatial randomness
Last week I generated two kinds of random point patterns: one from the uniform distribution on a two-dimensional rectangle, the other by jittering a regular grid by a small amount. My show choir director liked the second method (jittering) better because of the way it looks on stage: there are [...]
Post a Comment Simulating a Christmas gift exchange
Computing probabilities can be tricky. And if you are a statistician and you get them wrong, you feel pretty foolish. That’s why I like to run a quick simulation just to make sure that the numbers that I think are correct are, in fact, correct. My last post of 2010 [...]
Post a Comment Is the index to my book abnormally long?
When I finished writing my book, Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software, I was elated. However, one small task still remained. I had to write the index. How Long Should an Index Be? My editor told me that SAS Press would send the manuscript to a professional editor who would index [...]
Post a Comment How to find and fix programming errors
There are three kinds of programming errors: parse-time errors, run-time errors, and logical errors. It doesn’t matter what language you are using (SAS/IML, MATLAB, R, C/C++, Java,….), these errors creep up everywhere. Two of these errors cause a program to report an error, whereas the third is more insidious because [...]
Post a Comment Launching SAS/IML Studio
I give many presentations and workshops on how to use SAS/IML Studio, and more than once I have been asked about how to launch the program. Sometimes the inquiry hints at mild frustration, such as last week’s “How do I RUN the $%#@# THING!!!!” The email I got this week [...]
Post a Comment SAS/IML software featured at WUSS
Today I’m in San Diego at the 2010 meeting of the Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS). I am giving several presentations on SAS/IML and SAS/IML Studio: A tutorial workshop on SAS/IML Studio for the SAS/STAT User. The material in this tutorial is a small sampling of Chapters 4–11 of [...]
Post a Comment What is IMLPlus?
The IMLPlus language has been available to SAS customers since 2002, but there are still many people who have never heard of it. What is IMLPlus? The documentation SAS/IML Studio for SAS/STAT Users says this about IMLPlus: The programming language in SAS/IML Studio, which is called IMLPlus, is an enhanced [...]
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