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.
To a numerical analyst, numerical integration has two meanings. Numerical integration often means solving a definite integral such as \(\int_{a}^b f(s) \, ds\). Numerical integration is also called quadrature because it computes areas. The other meaning applies to solving ordinary differential equations (ODEs). My article about new methods for solving
Recently, I showed how to use a heat map to visualize measurements over time for a set of patients in a longitudinal study. The visualization is sometimes called a lasagna plot because it presents an alternative to the usual spaghetti plot. A reader asked whether a similar visualization can be
What is McNemar's test? How do you run the McNemar test in SAS? Why might other statistical software report a value for McNemar's test that is different from the SAS value? SAS supports an exact version of the McNemar test, but when should you use it? This article answers these
Some matrices are so special that they have names. The identity matrix is the most famous, but many are named after a researcher who studied them such as the Hadamard, Hilbert, Sylvester, Toeplitz, and Vandermonde matrices. This article is about the Pascal matrix, which is formed by using elements from
Many discussions and articles about SAS Viya emphasize its ability to handle Big Data, perform parallel processing, and integrate open-source languages. These are important issues for some SAS customers. But for customers who program in SAS and do not have Big Data, SAS Viya is attractive because it is the
The graph to the right is the quantile function for the standard normal distribution, which is sometimes called the probit function. Given any probability, p, the quantile function gives the value, x, such that the area under the normal density curve to the left of x is exactly p. This
Oh, no! Your boss just told you to change the way that SAS displays certain features in graphs, such as missing values. But you have a library of hundreds of SAS programs! Do you need to modify all of your previous programs? Fortunately, the answer is no. SAS provides ODS
In an article about how to visualize missing data in a heat map, I noted that the SAS SG procedures (such as PROC SGPLOT) use the GraphMissing style element to color a bar or tile that represents a missing value. In the HTMLBlue ODS style, the color for missing values
Longitudinal data are measurements for a set of subjects at multiple points in time. Also called "panel data" or "repeated measures data," this kind of data is common in clinical trials in which patients are tracked over time. Recently, a SAS programmer asked how to visualize missing values in a
This article shows how to compute properties of a discrete probability distribution from basic definitions. You can use the definitions to compute the mean, variance, and median of a discrete probability distribution when there is no simple formula for those quantities. This article is motivated by two computational questions about
