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 a previous article, I showed how to find the intersection (if it exists) between two line segments in the plane. There are some fun problems in probability theory that involve intersections of line segments. One is "What is the probability that two randomly chosen chords of a circle intersect?"
Back in high school, you probably learned to find the intersection of two lines in the plane. The intersection requires solving a system of two linear equations. There are three cases: (1) the lines intersect in a unique point, (2) the lines are parallel and do not intersect, or (3)
SAS enables you to evaluate a regression model at any location within the range of the data. However, sometimes you might be interested in how the predicted response is increasing or decreasing at specified locations. You can use finite differences to compute the slope (first derivative) of a regression model.
Which president of the United States is ranked the greatest by presidential historians? This article visualizes the results of the 2018 Presidential Greatness Survey, which was created and administered by B. Rottinghaus and J. Vaughn. They analyzed 166 responses from experts in political science who ranked the 44 US presidents
This article describes how to obtain an initial guess for nonlinear regression models, especially nonlinear mixed models. The technique is to first fit a simpler fixed-effects model by replacing the random effects with their expected values. The parameter estimates for the fixed-effects model are often good initial guesses for the
When you fit nonlinear fixed-effect or mixed models, it is difficult to guess the model parameters that fit the data. Yet, most nonlinear regression procedures (such as PROC NLIN and PROC NLMIXED in SAS) require that you provide a good guess! If your guess is not good, the fitting algorithm,
A previous article provides an example of using the BOOTSTRAP statement in PROC TTEST to compute bootstrap estimates of statistics in a two-sample t test. The BOOTSTRAP statement is new in SAS/STAT 14.3 (SAS 9.4M5). However, you can perform the same bootstrap analysis in earlier releases of SAS by using
Bootstrap resampling is a powerful way to estimate the standard error for a statistic without making any parametric assumptions about its sampling distribution. The bootstrap method is often implemented by using a sequence of calls to resample from the data, compute a statistic on each sample, and analyze the bootstrap
My 2018 SAS Global Forum paper was about "how to use the random-number generators (RNGs) in SAS." You can read the paper for details, but I recently recorded a short video that summarizes the main ideas in the paper. In particular, the video gives an overview of the new RNGs
If you use PROC SGPLOT to create ODS graphics, "ATTRS" are everywhere. ATTRS is an abbreviation of "attributes." Most options that change the attributes of a graphical element end with the ATTRS suffix. For example, the MARKERATTRS option modifies attributes of markers, the LINEATTRS option modifies attributes of lines, and
