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.
In the beginning, SAS created procedures and output. The output was formless and void. Then SAS said, "Let there be ODS," and there was ODS. Customers saw that ODS was good, and SAS separated the computation from the display and management of output. The preceding paragraph oversimplifies the SAS Output
“La Quinta” is Spanish for “next to Denny’s.” -- Mitch Hedberg, comedian Mitch Hedberg's joke resonates with travelers who drive on the US interstate system because many highway exits feature both a La Quinta Inn™ and a Denny's® restaurant within a short distance of each other. But does a
I wrote 105 posts for The DO Loop blog in 2016. My most popular articles were about data analysis, SAS programming tips, and elementary statistics. Without further ado, here are the most popular articles from 2016. Data Analysis and Visualization Start with a juicy set of data and an interesting
How can you generate data that contains outliers in a simulation study? The contaminated normal distribution is a simple but useful distribution you can use to simulate outliers. The distribution is easy to explain and understand, and it is also easy to implement in SAS. What is a contaminated normal
In some applications, you need to optimize a linear objective function of many variables, subject to linear constraints. Solving this problem is called linear programming or linear optimization. This article shows two ways to solve linear programming problems in SAS: You can use the OPTMODEL procedure in SAS/OR software or
Out of the bosom of the Air, Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken, Over the woodlands brown and bare, Over the harvest-fields forsaken, Silent, and soft, and slow Descends the snow. "Snow-flakes" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Happy holidays to all my readers! In my last post I showed
I have a fondness for fractals. In previous articles, I've used SAS to create some of my favorite fractals, including a fractal Christmas tree and the "devil's staircase" (Cantor ) function. Because winter is almost here, I think it is time to construct the Koch snowflake fractal in SAS. A
Many SAS procedure compute statistics and also compute confidence intervals for the associated parameters. For example, PROC MEANS can compute the estimate of a univariate mean, and you can use the CLM option to get a confidence interval for the population mean. Many parametric regression procedures (such as PROC GLM)
A recent issue of Astronomy magazine mentioned Kepler's third law of planetary motion, which states "the square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of its average distance from the Sun" (Astronomy, Dec 2016, p. 17). The article included a graph (shown at the right) that shows
Do you want to create customized SAS graphs by using PROC SGPLOT and the other ODS graphics procedures? An essential skill that you need to learn is how to merge, join, append, and concatenate SAS data sets that come from different sources. The SAS statistical graphics procedures (SG procedures) enable
In the classic textbook by Johnson and Wichern (Applied Multivariate Statistical Analysis, Third Edition, 1992, p. 164), it says: All measures of goodness-of-fit suffer the same serious drawback. When the sample size is small, only the most aberrant behaviors will be identified as lack of fit. On the other hand,
Somewhere in my past I encountered a panel of histograms for small random samples of normal data. I can't remember the source, but it might have been from John Tukey or William Cleveland. The point of the panel was to emphasize that (because of sampling variation) a small random sample
A SAS customer asked how to use background colors and a dashed line to emphasize the forecast region for a graph that shows a time series model. The task requires the following steps: Use the ATTRPRIORITY=NONE option on the ODS GRAPHICS statement to make sure that the current ODS style
At a conference last week, a presenter showed SAS statements that compute the logarithm of a probability density function (PDF). The log-PDF is a a common computation because it occurs when maximizing the log-likelihood function. The presenter computed the expression in SAS by using an expression that looked like y
Who was the oldest person elected president of the United States? How about the youngest? Who was the oldest when he left office? Let's look at some data. Wikipedia has a page that presents a table of the presidents of the US by age. It lists the dates for which
If you obtain data from web sites, social media, or other unstandardized data sources, you might not know the form of dates in the data. For example, the US Independence Day might be represented as "04JUL1776", "07/04/1776", "Jul 4, 1776", or "July 4, 1776." Fortunately, the ANYDTDTE informat makes it
This article uses graphical techniques to visualize one of my favorite geometric objects: the surface of a three-dimensional torus. Along the way, this article demonstrates techniques that are useful for visualizing more mundane 3-D point clouds that arise in statistical data analysis. Define points on a torus A torus is
Rotation matrices are used in computer graphics and in statistical analyses. A rotation matrix is especially easy to implement in a matrix language such as the SAS Interactive Matrix Language (SAS/IML). This article shows how to implement three-dimensional rotation matrices and use them to rotate a 3-D point cloud. Define
Occasionally on a discussion forum, a statistical programmer will ask a question like the following: I am trying to fit a parametric distribution to my data. The sample has a long tail, so I have tried the lognormal, Weibull, and gamma distributions, but nothing seems to fit. Please help!! In
Every year near Halloween I write an article in which I demonstrate a simple programming trick that is a real treat to use. This year's trick (which features the CMISS function and the crossproducts matrix in SAS/IML) enables you to count the number of observations that are missing for pairs
When simulating data or testing algorithms, it is useful to be able to generate patterns of missing data. This article shows how to generate random and systematic patterns of missing values. In other words, this article shows how to replace nonmissing data with missing data. Generate a random pattern of
I've written several articles about scatter plot smoothers: nonparametric regression curves that reveal small- and large-scale features of a response variable as a function of an explanatory variable. However, there is another kind of "smoothness" that you might care about, and that is the apparent smoothness of curves and markers
A previous post discusses how the loess regression algorithm is implemented in SAS. The LOESS procedure in SAS/STAT software provides the data analyst with options to control the loess algorithm and fit nonparametric smoothing curves through points in a scatter plot. Although PROC LOESS satisfies 99.99% of SAS users who
Loess regression is a nonparametric technique that uses local weighted regression to fit a smooth curve through points in a scatter plot. Loess curves are can reveal trends and cycles in data that might be difficult to model with a parametric curve. Loess regression is one of several algorithms in
How far away is the nearest hospital? How far is the nearest restaurant? The nearest gas station? These are commonly asked questions whose answers depend on the location of the person asking the question. Recently I showed an algorithm that enables you to find the distance between a set of
The WHERE clause in SAS is a powerful mechanism for selecting observations as you read or write a data set. The WHERE clause supports many operators, including the IN operator, which enables you to compactly specify multiple conditions for a categorical variable. A common use of the IN operator is
What is weighted regression? How does it differ from ordinary (unweighted) regression? This article describes how to compute and score weighted regression models. Visualize a weighted regression Technically, an "unweighted" regression should be called an "equally weighted " regression since each ordinary least squares (OLS) regression weights each observation equally.
The recent releases of SAS 9.4 have featured major enhancements to the ODS statistical graphics procedures such as PROC SGPLOT. In fact, PROC SGPLOT (and the underlying Graph Template Language (GTL)) are so versatile and powerful that you might forget to consider whether you can create a graph automatically by
Last week I showed how to find the nearest neighbors for a set of d-dimensional points. A SAS user wrote to ask whether something similar could be done when you have two distinct groups of points and you want to find the elements in the second group that are closest
My son is taking an AP Statistics course in high school this year. AP Statistics is one of the fastest-growing AP courses, so I welcome the chance to see topics and techniques in the course. Last week I was pleased to see that they teach data exploration techniques, such as
