Rick Wicklin, PhD, is a distinguished researcher in computational statistics at SAS and is a principal developer of SAS/IML software. His areas of expertise include computational statistics, simulation, statistical graphics, and modern methods in statistical data analysis. Rick is author of the books Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software and Simulating Data with SAS.
Many characteristics of a graph are determined by the underlying data at run time. A familiar example is when you use colors to indicate different groups in the data. If the data have three groups, you see three colors. If the data have four groups, you see four colors. The
I've previously written about how to generate all pairwise interactions for a regression model in SAS. For a model that contains continuous effects, the easiest way is to use the EFFECT statement in PROC GLMSELECT to generate second-degree "polynomial effects." However, a SAS programmer was running a simulation study and
One of the first things I learned in SAS was how to use PROC PRINT to display parts of a data set. I usually do not need to see all the data, so my favorite way to use PROC PRINT is to use the OBS= data set option to display
Look at the following matrices. Do you notice anything that these matrices have in common? If you noticed that the rows of each matrix are arithmetic progressions, good for you. For each row, there is a constant difference (also called the "increment") between adjacent elements. For these examples: In the
In a previous article, I showed how to generate random points uniformly inside a d-dimensional sphere. In that article, I stated the following fact: If Y is drawn from the uncorrelated multivariate normal distribution, then S = Y / ||Y|| has the uniform distribution on the unit sphere. I was
Imagine an animal that is searching for food in a vast environment where food is scarce. If no prey is nearby, the animal's senses (such as smell and sight) are useless. In that case, a reasonable search strategy is a random walk. The animal can choose a random direction, walk/swim/fly
The inverse gamma distribution is a continuous probability distribution that is used in Bayesian analysis and in some statistical models. The inverse gamma distribution is closely related to the gamma distribution. For any probability distribution, it is essential to know how to compute four functions: the PDF function, which returns
Years ago, I wrote about how to compute the incomplete beta function in SAS. Recently, a SAS programmer asked about a similar function, called the incomplete gamma function. The incomplete gamma function is a "special function" that arises in applied math, physics, and statistics. You should not confuse the gamma
This is the third and last introductory article about how to bootstrap time series in SAS. In the first article, I presented the simple block bootstrap and discussed why bootstrapping a time series is more complicated than for regression models that assume independent errors. Briefly, when you perform residual resampling
Have you ever heard of the DOLIST syntax? You might know the syntax even if you are not familiar with the name. The DOLIST syntax is a way to specify a list of numerical values to an option in a SAS procedure. Applications include: Specify the end points for bins
As I discussed in a previous article, the simple block bootstrap is a way to perform a bootstrap analysis on a time series. The first step is to decompose the series into additive components: Y = Predicted + Residuals. You then choose a block length (L) that divides the total
On The DO Loop blog, I write about a diverse set of topics, including statistical data analysis, machine learning, statistical programming, data visualization, simulation, numerical analysis, and matrix computations. In a previous article, I presented some of my most popular blog posts from 2020. The most popular articles often deal
For ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, you can use a basic bootstrap of the residuals (called residual resampling) to perform a bootstrap analysis of the parameter estimates. This is possible because an assumption of OLS regression is that the residuals are independent. Therefore, you can reshuffle the residuals to get
Last year, I wrote more than 100 posts for The DO Loop blog. In previous years, the most popular articles were about SAS programming tips, statistical analysis, and data visualization. But not in 2020. In 2020, when the world was ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic, the most-read articles were related
When you perform a linear regression, you can examine the R-square value, which is a goodness-of-fit statistic that indicates how well the response variable can be represented as a linear combination of the explanatory variables. But did you know that you can also go the other direction? Given a set
Do you know that you can create a vector that has a specific correlation with another vector? That is, given a vector, x, and a correlation coefficient, ρ, you can find a vector, y, such that corr(x, y) = ρ. The vectors x and y can have an arbitrary number
A segmented regression model is a piecewise regression model that has two or more sub-models, each defined on a separate domain for the explanatory variables. For simplicity, assume the model has one continuous explanatory variable, X. The simplest segmented regression model assumes that the response is modeled by one parametric
One purpose of principal component analysis (PCA) is to reduce the number of important variables in a data analysis. Thus, PCA is known as a dimension-reduction algorithm. I have written about four simple rules for deciding how many principal components (PCs) to keep. There are other methods for deciding how
"O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, how lovely are your branches!" The idealized image of a Christmas tree is a perfectly straight conical tree with lush branches and no bare spots. Although this ideal exists only on Christmas cards, forest researchers are always trying to develop trees that approach the
A SAS customer asked a great question: "I have parameter estimates for a logistic regression model that I computed by using multiple imputations. How do I use these parameter estimates to score new observations and to visualize the model? PROC LOGISTIC can do the computation I want, but how do
Most games of skill are transitive. If Player A wins against Player B and Player B wins against Player C, then you expect Player A to win against Player C, should they play. Because of this, you can rank the players: A > B > C Interestingly, not all games
I previously showed how to create a decile calibration plot for a logistic regression model in SAS. A decile calibration plot (or "decile plot," for short) is used in some fields to visualize agreement between the data and a regression model. It can be used to diagnose an incorrectly specified
To help visualize regression models, SAS provides the EFFECTPLOT statement in several regression procedures and in PROC PLM, which is a general-purpose procedure for post-fitting analysis of linear models. When scoring and visualizing a model, it is important to use reasonable combinations of the explanatory variables for the visualization. When
I have previously written about how to plot a discontinuous function in SAS. That article shows how to use the GROUP= option on the SERIES statement to graph a discontinuous function. An alternative approach is to place a missing value for the Y variable at the locations at which the
The REFLINE statement in PROC SGPLOT is one of my favorite ways to augment statistical graphics such as scatter plots, series plots, and histograms. The REFLINE statement overlays a vertical or horizontal reference line on a graph. You can specify the location of the reference lines on the REFLINE statement.
Intuitively, the skewness of a unimodal distribution indicates whether a distribution is symmetric or not. If the right tail has more mass than the left tail, the distribution is "right skewed." If the left tail has more mass, the distribution is "left skewed." Thus, estimating skewness requires some estimates about
The expected value of a random variable is essentially a weighted mean over all possible values. You can compute it by summing (or integrating) a probability-weighted quantity over all possible values of the random variable. The expected value is a measure of the "center" of a probability distribution. You can
When there are two equivalent ways to do something, I advocate choosing the one that is simpler and more efficient. Sometimes, I encounter a SAS program that simulates random numbers in a way that is neither simple nor efficient. This article demonstrates two improvements that you can make to your
The skewness of a distribution indicates whether a distribution is symmetric or not. The Wikipedia article about skewness discusses two common definitions for the sample skewness, including the definition used by SAS. In the middle of the article, you will discover the following sentence: In general, the [estimators] are both
A fundamental principle of data analysis is that a statistic is an estimate of a parameter for the population. A statistic is calculated from a random sample. This leads to uncertainty in the estimate: a different random sample would have produced a different statistic. To quantify the uncertainty, SAS procedures
