Search Results: simulation (465)

Learn SAS | Programming Tips
Rick Wicklin 0
Data-driven simulation

In a large simulation study, it can be convenient to have a "control file" that contains the parameters for the study. My recent article about how to simulate multivariate normal clusters demonstrates a simple example of this technique. The simulation in that article uses an input data set that contains

Rick Wicklin 0
Monte Carlo simulation for contingency tables in SAS

The FREQ procedure in SAS supports computing exact p-values for many statistical tests. For small and mid-sized problems, the procedure runs very quickly. However, even though PROC FREQ uses efficient methods to avoid unnecessary computations, the computational time required by exact tests might be prohibitively expensive for certain tables. If

Rick Wicklin 0
Models and simulation for 2x2 contingency tables

When modeling and simulating data, it is important to be able to articulate the real-life statistical process that generates the data. Suppose a friend says to you, "I want to simulate two random correlated variables, X and Y." Usually this means that he wants data generated from a multivariate distribution,

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Emily Lada 0
Using simulation to help Duke Hospital's tiniest patients

Last year, my SAS Simulation Studio R&D team began a discrete-event simulation modeling project of a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) with two doctors from Duke University’s Division of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine.  After several initial meetings discussing such things as necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), patent ductus arteriosis (PDA), and

Rick Wicklin 0
Efficient acceptance-rejection simulation

A few days ago on the SAS/IML Support Community, there was an interesting discussion about how to simulate data from a truncated Poisson distribution. The SAS/IML user wanted to generate values from a Poisson distribution, but discard any zeros that are generated. This kind of simulation is known as an

Rick Wicklin 0
Using macro loops for simulation

Last week I wrote an article in which I pointed out that many SAS programmers write a simulation in SAS by writing a macro loop. This approach is extremely inefficient, so I presented a more efficient technique. Not only is the macro loop approach slow, but there are other undesirable

Rick Wicklin 0
How to lie with a simulation

In my article on Buffon's needle experiment, I showed a graph that converges fairly nicely and regularly to the value π, which is the value that the simulation is trying to estimate. This graph is, indeed, a typical graph, as you can verify by running the simulation yourself. However, notice

Rick Wicklin 0
Simulation of Buffon's needle in SAS

Buffon's needle experiment for estimating π is a classical example of using an experiment (or a simulation) to estimate a probability. This example is presented in many books on statistical simulation and is famous enough that Brian Ripley in his book Stochastic Simulation states that the problem is "well known

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