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.
NOTE: SAS stopped shipping the SAS/IML Studio interface in 2018. The references in this article to IMLPlus and SAS/IML Studio are no longer relevant. There are three kinds of programming errors: parse-time errors, run-time errors, and logical errors. It doesn't matter what language you are using (SAS/IML, MATLAB, R, C/C++,
Both covariance matrices and correlation matrices are used frequently in multivariate statistics. You can easily compute covariance and correlation matrices from data by using SAS software. However, sometimes you are given a covariance matrix, but your numerical technique requires a correlation matrix. Other times you are given a correlation matrix,
Sample covariance matrices and correlation matrices are used frequently in multivariate statistics. This post shows how to compute these matrices in SAS and use them in a SAS/IML program. There are two ways to compute these matrices: Compute the covariance and correlation with PROC CORR and read the results into
I enjoy reading about the Le Monde puzzles (and other topics!) at Christian Robert's blog. Recently he asked how to convert a number with s digits into a numerical vector where each element of the vector contains the corresponding digit (by place value). For example, if the number is 4321,
The SAS/IML language enables you to perform matrix-vector computations. However, it also provides a convenient "shorthand notation" that enables you to perform elementwise operation on rows or columns in a natural way. You might know that the SAS/IML language supports subscript reduction operators to compute basic rowwise or columnwise quantities.
My last post was a criticism of a statistical graph that appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek. Criticism is easy. Analysis is harder. In this post I re-analyze the data to present two graphics that I think should have replaced the one graphic in Businessweek. You can download the SAS program that
Recently I read a blog that advertised a data visualization competition. Under the heading "What Are We Looking For?" is a link to a 2007 Bloomberg Businessweek graph that visualizes how participation in online social media activities vary across age groups. The graph is reproduced below at a smaller scale:
Errors. We all make them. After all, “to err is human.” Or, as programmers often say, “To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer” (Farmer’s Almanac, 1978). This post describes how to interpret error messages from PROC IML that appear in the SAS log. The
I am thankful to be a statistical programmer. When I wake up in the morning, I am eager to start my day. I love statistics, programming, and working at SAS, and I write my blog to share that joy. This a Golden Age for statistical programmers because theoretical ideas and
I give many presentations and workshops on how to use SAS/IML Studio, and more than once I have been asked about how to launch the program. Sometimes the inquiry hints at mild frustration, such as last week's "How do I RUN the $%#@# THING!!!!" The email I got this week
