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.
Occasionally a SAS statistical programmer will ask me, "How can I construct a large correlation matrix?" Often they are simulating data with SAS or developing a matrix algorithm that involves a correlation matrix. Typically they want a correlation matrix that is too large to input by hand, such as a
Dear Rick, I have a data set with 1,001 numerical variables. One variable is the response, the others are explanatory variable. How can I read the 1,000 explanatory variables into an IML matrix without typing every name? That's a good question. You need to be able to perform two sub-tasks:
Last week I discussed ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models and showed how to illustrate the assumptions about the conditional distribution of the response variable. For a single continuous explanatory variable, the illustration is a scatter plot with a regression line and several normal probability distributions along the line. The
