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.
In grade school, students learn how to round numbers to the nearest integer. In later years, students learn variations, such as rounding up and rounding down by using the greatest integer function and least integer function, respectively. My sister, who is an engineer, learned a rounding method that rounds half-integers
Principal component analysis (PCA) is an important tool for understanding relationships in continuous multivariate data. When the first two principal components (PCs) explain a significant portion of the variance in the data, you can visualize the data by projecting the observations onto the span of the first two PCs. In
Understanding multivariate statistics requires mastery of high-dimensional geometry and concepts in linear algebra such as matrix factorizations, basis vectors, and linear subspaces. Graphs can help to summarize what a multivariate analysis is telling us about the data. This article looks at four graphs that are often part of a principal
Every year at Halloween, I post an article that shows a SAS trick that is a real treat. This article shows how to use the INTNX function to find dates that are related to a specified date. The INTNX function is a sweet treat, indeed. I previously wrote an article
A common task in SAS programming is to specify a list of variables that satisfy some pattern. You can specify lists for the KEEP= or DROP= data set options, and you can use lists of variables on many SAS statements such as the VAR and MODEL statements. Although SAS has
In response to a recent article about how to compute the cosine similarity of observations, a reader asked whether it is practical (or even possible) to perform these types of computations on data sets that have many thousands of observations. The problem is that the cosine similarity matrix is an
Computing rates and proportions is a common task in data analysis. When you are computing several proportions, it is helpful to visualize how the rates vary among subgroups of the population. Examples of proportions that depend on subgroups include: Mortality rates for various types of cancers Incarceration rates by race
The EFFECT statement is supported by more than a dozen SAS/STAT regression procedures. Among other things, it enables you to generate spline effects that you can use to fit nonlinear relationships in data. Recently there was a discussion on the SAS Support Communities about how to interpret the parameter estimates
I recently wrote about how to use PROC TTEST in SAS/STAT software to compute the geometric mean and related statistics. This prompted a SAS programmer to ask a related question. Suppose you have dozens (or hundreds) of variables and you want to compute the geometric mean of each. What is
In a previous article, I mentioned that the VLINE statement in PROC SGPLOT is an easy way to graph the mean response at a set of discrete time points. I mentioned that you can choose three options for the length of the "error bars": the standard deviation of the data,
