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.
This article shows how to perform an optimization in SAS when the parameters are restricted by nonlinear constraints. In particular, it solves an optimization problem where the parameters are constrained to lie in the annular region between two circles. The end of the article shows the path of partial solutions
My colleague, Robert Allison, recently published an interesting visualization of the relationship between chess ratings and age. His post was inspired by the article "Age vs Elo — Your battle against time," which was published on the chess.com website. ("Elo" is one of the rating systems in chess.) Robert Allison's
The SGPLOT procedure in SAS makes it easy to create graphs that overlay various groups in the data. Many statements support the GROUP= option, which specifies that the graph should overlay group information. For example, you can create side-by-side bar charts and box plots, and you can overlay multiple scatter
This article shows how to score (evaluate) a quantile regression model on new data. SAS supports several procedures for quantile regression, including the QUANTREG, QUANTSELECT, and HPQUANTSELECT procedures. The first two procedures do not support any of the modern methods for scoring regression models, so you must use the "missing
When you use a regression procedure in SAS that supports variable selection (GLMSELECT or QUANTSELECT), did you know that the procedures automatically produce a macro variable that contains the names of the selected variables? This article provides examples and details. A previous article provides an overview of the 'SELECT' procedures
A programmer recently asked a question on a SAS discussion forum about design matrices for categorical variables. He had generated a design matrix by using PROC GLMMOD and wanted to use the design columns in a subsequent procedure. However, the columns were named COL1, COL2, COL3,..., so he couldn't tell
Back in SAS 9.3M2 (SAS/STAT 12.1), PROC FREQ introduced mosaic plots to visualize the joint frequencies in a contingency table. By default, the cells in a mosaic plot are colored according to levels of one of the categorical variables in the analysis. However, in 2013 I showed how you can
Since the late 1990s, SAS has supplied macros for basic bootstrap and jackknife analyses. This article provides an example that shows how to use the %BOOT and %BOOTCI macros. The %BOOT macro generates a bootstrap distribution and computes basic statistics about the bootstrap distribution, including estimates of bias, standard error,
This article shows how to implement balanced bootstrap sampling in SAS. The basic bootstrap samples with replacement from the original data (N observations) to obtain B new samples. This is called "uniform" resampling because each observation has a uniform probability of 1/N of being selected at each step of the
My colleague Robert Allison recently blogged about using the diameter of Texas as a unit of measurement. The largest distance across Texas is about 801 miles, so Robert wanted to find the set of all points such that the distance from the point to Texas is less than or equal
