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.
One purpose of principal component analysis (PCA) is to reduce the number of important variables in a data analysis. Thus, PCA is known as a dimension-reduction algorithm. I have written about four simple rules for deciding how many principal components (PCs) to keep. There are other methods for deciding how
"O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, how lovely are your branches!" The idealized image of a Christmas tree is a perfectly straight conical tree with lush branches and no bare spots. Although this ideal exists only on Christmas cards, forest researchers are always trying to develop trees that approach the
A SAS customer asked a great question: "I have parameter estimates for a logistic regression model that I computed by using multiple imputations. How do I use these parameter estimates to score new observations and to visualize the model? PROC LOGISTIC can do the computation I want, but how do
Most games of skill are transitive. If Player A wins against Player B and Player B wins against Player C, then you expect Player A to win against Player C, should they play. Because of this, you can rank the players: A > B > C Interestingly, not all games
I previously showed how to create a decile calibration plot for a logistic regression model in SAS. A decile calibration plot (or "decile plot," for short) is used in some fields to visualize agreement between the data and a regression model. It can be used to diagnose an incorrectly specified
To help visualize regression models, SAS provides the EFFECTPLOT statement in several regression procedures and in PROC PLM, which is a general-purpose procedure for post-fitting analysis of linear models. When scoring and visualizing a model, it is important to use reasonable combinations of the explanatory variables for the visualization. When
I have previously written about how to plot a discontinuous function in SAS. That article shows how to use the GROUP= option on the SERIES statement to graph a discontinuous function. An alternative approach is to place a missing value for the Y variable at the locations at which the
The REFLINE statement in PROC SGPLOT is one of my favorite ways to augment statistical graphics such as scatter plots, series plots, and histograms. The REFLINE statement overlays a vertical or horizontal reference line on a graph. You can specify the location of the reference lines on the REFLINE statement.
Intuitively, the skewness of a unimodal distribution indicates whether a distribution is symmetric or not. If the right tail has more mass than the left tail, the distribution is "right skewed." If the left tail has more mass, the distribution is "left skewed." Thus, estimating skewness requires some estimates about
The expected value of a random variable is essentially a weighted mean over all possible values. You can compute it by summing (or integrating) a probability-weighted quantity over all possible values of the random variable. The expected value is a measure of the "center" of a probability distribution. You can
