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.
As you develop a program in the SAS/IML language, it is often useful to create graphs to visualize intermediate results. The language supports basic statistical graphics such as bar charts, histograms, scatter plots, and so on. However, you can create more advanced graphics without leaving PROC IML by using the
A colleague asked me an interesting question: I have a journal article that includes sample quantiles for a variable. Given a new data value, I want to approximate its quantile. I also want to simulate data from the distribution of the published data. Is that possible? This situation is common.
I've pointed out in the past that in the SAS/IML language matrices are passed to modules "by reference." This means that large matrices are not copied in and out of modules but are updated "in place." As a result, the SAS/IML language can be very efficient when it computes with
