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.
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,
It is always great to read an old paper or blog post and think, "This task is so much easier in SAS 9.4!" I had that thought recently when I stumbled on a 2007 paper by Wei Cheng titled "Graphical Representation of Mean Measurement over Time." A substantial portion of
I frequently see questions on SAS discussion forums about how to compute the geometric mean and related quantities in SAS. Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are sometimes confusing or even wrong. In addition, some published papers and web sites that claim to show how to calculate the geometric mean
There are several different kinds of means. They all try to find an average value from among a set of numbers. Although the most popular mean is the arithmetic mean, the geometric mean can be useful for problems in statistics, finance, and biology. A common application of the geometric mean
One of the strengths of the SAS/IML language is its flexibility. Recently, a SAS programmer asked how to generalize a program in a previous article. The original program solved one optimization problem. The reader said that she wants to solve this type of problem 300 times, each time using a
Although I do not typically blog about undocumented SAS options, I'll make an exception this time. For many years, I have known that the CONTENTS and COMPARE procedures support the BRIEF and SHORT options, but I always forget which option goes with which procedure. For the record, here are the
In a scatter plot that displays many points, it can be important to visualize the density of the points. Scatter plots (indeed, all plots that show individual markers) can suffer from overplotting, which means that the graph does not indicate how many observations are at a specific (x, y) location.
