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.
When I was in the sixth grade, I learned an iterative procedure for computing square roots by hand. Yes, I said by hand. Scientific calculators with a square root key were not yet widely available, so I and previous generations of children suffered through learning to calculate square roots by
Optimization is a primary tool of computational statistics. SAS/IML software provides a suite of nonlinear optimizers that makes it easy to find an optimum for a user-defined objective function. You can perform unconstrained optimization, or define linear or nonlinear constraints for constrained optimization. Over the years I have seen many
Last week I analyzed 12 million records of taxi cab transactions in New York City. As part of that analysis, I used a DATA step view to create a new variable, which was the ratio of the tip amount to the fare amount. A novice SAS programmer told me that
