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.
If you tell my wife that she's married to a statistical geek, she'll nod knowingly. She is used to hearing sweet words of affection such as You are more beautiful than Euler's identity. or My love for you is like the exponential function: increasing, unbounded, and transcendental. But those are
In a previous blog post, I described the rules for a tic-tac-toe scratch-off lottery game and showed that it is a bad idea to generate the game tickets by using a scheme that uses equal probabilities. Instead, cells that yield large cash awards must be assigned a small probability of
Because of this week's story about a geostatistician, Mohan Srivastava, who figured out how predict winning tickets in a scratch-off lottery, I've been thinking about scratch-off games. He discovered how to predict winners when he began to "wonder how they make these [games]." Each ticket has a set of "lucky
I enjoyed the Dataists' data-driven blog on the best numbers to choose in a Super Bowl betting pool. It reminded me of my recent investigation of which initials are most common. Because the Dataists' blog featured an R function that converts Arabic numerals into Roman numerals, the blog post also
The other day, someone asked me how to compute a matrix of pairwise differences for a vector of values. The person asking the question was using SQL to do the computation for 2,000 data points, and it was taking many hours to compute the pairwise differences. He asked if SAS/IML
On Friday, I posted an article about using spatial statistics to detect whether a pattern of points is truly random. That day, one of my colleagues asked me whether there are any practical applications of detecting spatial randomness or non-randomness. "Oh, sure," I replied, and rattled off a list of
When you pass a matrix as an parameter (argument) to a SAS/IML module, the SAS/IML language does not create a copy of the matrix. That approach, known as "calling by value," is inefficient. It is well-known that languages that implement call-by-value semantics suffer performance penalties. In the SAS/IML language, matrices
Last week I generated two kinds of random point patterns: one from the uniform distribution on a two-dimensional rectangle, the other by jittering a regular grid by a small amount. My show choir director liked the second method (jittering) better because of the way it looks on stage: there are
One of my New Year's resolutions is to learn a new area of statistics. I'm off to a good start, because I recently investigated an issue which started me thinking about spatial statistics—a branch of statistics that I have never formally studied. During the investigation, I asked myself: Given an
As Cat Truxillo points out in her recent blog post, some SAS procedures require data to be in a "long" (as opposed to "wide") format. Cat uses a DATA step to convert the data from wide to long format. Although there is nothing wrong with this approach, I prefer to
