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.
A SAS programmer asked an interesting question on a SAS Support Community. The programmer had a nonlinear function with 12 parameters. He also had file that contained 4,000 lines, where each line contained values for the 12 parameters. In other words, the file specified 4,000 different functions. The programmer wanted
One of the fundamental principles of computer programming is to break a task into smaller subtasks and to modularize the program by encapsulating each subtask into its own function. I have written many blog posts over the years about how to define and use functions in the SAS/IML language. I
A feature of SAS/IML 13.2 (shipped with SAS 9.4m2, Aug 2014) is the ability to execute SAS/IML statements that are in a file. The feature is implemented by the new EXECUTEFILE subroutine. This feature is similar to the CALL EXECUTE statement. The difference is that the EXECUTEFILE subroutine reads, parses,
"Daddy, help! Help me! Come quick!" I heard my daughter's screams from the upstairs bathroom and bounded up the stairs two at a time. Was she hurt? Bleeding? Was the toilet overflowing? When I arrived in the doorway, she pointed at the wall and at the floor. The wall was
Equations that involve trigonometric functions can have infinitely many solutions. For example, the solution to the equation tan(θ)=1 is θ = π/4 + kπ, where k is any integer. In order to obtain a unique solution to the equation, we define the "arc" functions: inverse trigonometric functions that return a
I still remember the first time I was asked to "consult" on a statistical problem. A former physics professor had some students who had gathered data that should lie along an arc of a theoretical circle. The professor asked if there was a regression technique that could find the center
I was reading a statistics book when I encountered a histogram that caught my eye. The histogram looked similar to the one at the left. It contained a normal density estimate overlaid on a histogram, but the height of the density curve seemed too short when compared to the heights
A SAS programmer asked for a list of SAS/IML functions that operate on the columns of an n x p matrix and return a 1 x p row vector of results. The functions that behave this way tend to compute univariate descriptive statistics such as the mean, median, standard deviation, and quantiles. The following
I previously wrote about the best way to suppress output from SAS procedures. Suppressing output is necessary in simulation and bootstrap analyses, and it is useful in other contexts as well. In my previous article, I wrote, "many programmers use ODS _ALL_ CLOSE as a way to suppress output, but
SAS procedures can produce a lot of output, but you don't always want to see it all. In simulation and bootstrap studies, you might analyze 10,000 samples or resamples. Usually you are not interested in seeing the results of each analysis displayed on your computer screen. Instead, you want to
When I was an undergraduate physic major, my favorite professor would start each class with a joke or pun. One day he began class with a paraphrase of a famous quote from the movie Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home (the one with the whales). "Today," my professor said, imitating
North Carolina is a state that requires yearly inspections of motor vehicles. An inspection checks for safety features (lights, brakes, tires,....) as well as checking vehicle emissions to ensure that vehicles meet air pollution standards. I recently had a car inspected and noticed a pie chart on the inspection's summary
Perhaps you saw the headlines earlier this week about the fact that it has been nine years since the last major hurricane (category 3, 4, or 5) hit the US coast. According to a post on the GeoSpace blog, which is published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), researchers ran
I always learn something new when I attend SAS Global Forum, and it often results from an informal conversations in The Quad or in a hallway. Last week a SAS customer described a scenario that he wanted to implement as part of an analysis of some genetic data. To oversimplify
A common task in data analysis is to locate observations that satisfy multiple criteria. For example, you might want to locate all zip codes in certain counties within specified states. The SAS DATA step contains the powerful WHERE statement, which enables you to extract a subset of data that satisfy
Last week I attended SAS Global Forum 2015 in Dallas. It was packed with almost 5,000 attendees. I learned many interesting things at the conference, including the fact that you need to arrive EARLY to the statistical presentations if you want to find an empty seat! It was gratifying to
Did you know that if you have set multiple titles in SAS, that there is an easy way to remove them? For example, suppose that you've written the following statements, which call the TITLE statement to set three titles: title "A Great Big Papa Title"; title2 "A Medium-sized Mama Title";
Suppose that you compute the correlation matrix (call it R1) for a set of variables x1, x2, ..., x8. For some reason, you later want to compute the correlation matrix for the variables in a different order, maybe x2, x1, x7,..., x6. Do you need to go back to the
Sometimes different communities use the same name for different objects. To a soldier, "boots" are rugged, heavy, high-top foot coverings. To a soccer (football) player, "boots" are lightweight cleats. So it is with the term "waterfall plot." To researchers in the medical field, a "waterfall plot" is a sorted bar
A customer asked: How do we go about summing a finite series in SAS? For example, I want to compute for various integers n ≥ 3. I want to output two columns, one for the natural numbers and one for the summation of the series. Summations arise often in statistical
In clinical trials, a waterfall plot is often used to indicate how patients in the study responded to treatment. In oncology trials, the response variable might be the percent change in the size of a tumor from the individual's baseline value at the start of the trial. The percent change
Last week I was chatting with some mathematicians and I mentioned the blog post that I wrote last year on the distribution of Pythagorean triples. In my previous article, I showed that there is an algorithm that uses matrix multiplication to generate every primitive Pythagorean triple by starting with the
Today is my 600th blog post for The DO Loop. I have written about many topics that are related to statistical programming, math, statistics, simulation, numerical analysis, matrix computations, and more. The right sidebar of my blog contains a tag cloud that links to many topics. What topics do you,
A common question from statistical programmers is how to compute the rank of a matrix in SAS. Recall that the rank of a matrix is defined as the number of linearly independent columns in the matrix. (Equivalently, the number of linearly independent rows.) This article describes how to compute the
The 2015 SAS Global Forum is in Dallas, TX, and I'll be there. There are many talks to see and people to meet, so thank goodness for the agenda builder, which enables you to create a schedule in advance. I always enjoy talking with SAS customers about statistics, simulations, matrix
The Monty Hall Problem is one of the most famous problems in elementary probability. It is famous because the correct solution is counter-intuitive and because it caused an uproar when it appeared in the "Ask Marilyn" column in Parade magazine in 1990. Discussing the problem has been known to create
There has been a spate of recent high-profile airline crashes (Malaysia Airlines, TransAsia Airways, Germanwings,...) so I was surprised when I saw a time series plot of the number of airline crashes by year, which indicates that the annual number of airline crashes has been decreasing since 1993. The data
There's "big," and then there is "factorial big." If you have k items, the number of permutations is "k factorial," which is written as k!. The factorial function gets big fast. For example, the value of k! for several values of k is shown in the following table. You can
The title of this article makes no sense. How can the number of elements (in fact, the number of anything!) not be a whole number? In fact, it can't. However, the title refers to the fact that you might compute a quantity that ought to be an integer, but is
Imagine that you have one million rows of numerical data and you want to determine if a particular "target" value occurs. How might you find where the value occurs? For univariate data, this is an easy problem. In the SAS DATA step you can use a WHERE clause or a
