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.
Suppose you roll six identical six-sided dice. Chance are that you will see at least one repeated number. The probability that you will see six unique numbers is very small: only 6! / 6^6 ≈ 0.015. This example can be generalized. If you draw a random sample with replacement from
My presentation at SAS Global Forum 2017 was "More Than Matrices: SAS/IML Software Supports New Data Structures." The paper was published in the conference proceedings several months ago, but I recently recorded a short video that gives an overview of using the new data structures in SAS/IML 14.2: If your
One way to assess the precision of a statistic (a point estimate) is to compute the standard error, which is the standard deviation of the statistic's sampling distribution. A relatively large standard error indicates that the point estimate should be viewed with skepticism, either because the sample size is small
Most numerical optimization routines require that the user provides an initial guess for the solution. I have previously described a method for choosing an initial guess for an optimization, which works well for low-dimensional optimization problems. Recently a SAS programmer asked how to find an initial guess when there are
In a previous article, I showed two ways to define a log-likelihood function in SAS. This article shows two ways to compute maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) in SAS: the nonlinear optimization subroutines in SAS/IML and the NLMIXED procedure in SAS/STAT. To illustrate these methods, I will use the same data
Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a powerful statistical technique that uses optimization techniques to fit parametric models. The technique finds the parameters that are "most likely" to have produced the observed data. SAS provides many tools for nonlinear optimization, so often the hardest part of maximum likelihood is writing down
I have previously discussed how to define functions that safely evaluate their arguments and return a missing value if the argument is not in the domain of the function. The canonical example is the LOG function, which is defined only for positive arguments. For example, to evaluate the LOG function
If you toss a coin 28 times, you would not be surprised to see three heads in a row, such as ...THHHTH.... But what about eight heads in a row? Would a sequence such as THHHHHHHHTH... be a rare event? This question popped into my head last weekend as I
Last week I was asked a simple question: "How do I choose a seed for the random number functions in SAS?" The answer might surprise you: use any seed you like. Each seed of a well-designed random number generator is likely to give rise to a stream of random numbers,
By default, when you use the SERIES statement in PROC SGPLOT to create a line plot, the observations are connected (in order) by straight line segments. However, SAS 9.4m1 introduced the SMOOTHCONNECT option which, as the name implies, uses a smooth curve to connect the observations. In Sanjay Matange's blog,
