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.
A SAS customer asked, "I computed the eigenvectors of a matrix in SAS and in another software package. I got different answers? How do I know which answer is correct?" I've been asked variations of this question dozens of times. The answer is usually "both answers are correct." The mathematical
Last week I blogged about the broken-stick problem in probability, which reminded me that the broken-stick model is one of the many techniques that have been proposed for choosing the number of principal components to retain during a principal component analysis. Recall that for a principal component analysis (PCA) of
A SAS user needed to convert a program from MATLAB into the SAS/IML matrix language and asked whether there is a SAS/IML equivalent to the fliplr and flipud functions in MATLAB. These functions flip the columns or rows (respectively) of a matrix; "LR" stands for "left-right" and "UD" stands for
A classical problem in elementary probability asks for the expected lengths of line segments that result from randomly selecting k points along a segment of unit length. It is both fun and instructive to simulate such problems. This article uses simulation in the SAS/IML language to estimate solutions to the
For a time series { y1, y2, ..., yN }, the difference operator computes the difference between two observations. The kth-order difference is the series { yk+1 - y1, ..., yN - yN-k }. In SAS, the DIF function in the DATA step computes differences between observations. The DIF function
Skewness is a measure of the asymmetry of a univariate distribution. I have previously shown how to compute the skewness for data distributions in SAS. The previous article computes Pearson's definition of skewness, which is based on the standardized third central moment of the data. Moment-based statistics are sensitive to
An important problem in machine learning is the "classification problem." In this supervised learning problem, you build a statistical model that predicts a set of categorical outcomes (responses) based on a set of input features (explanatory variables). You do this by training the model on data for which the outcomes
I recently showed how to compute a bootstrap percentile confidence interval in SAS. The percentile interval is a simple "first-order" interval that is formed from quantiles of the bootstrap distribution. However, it has two limitations. First, it does not use the estimate for the original data; it is based only
I previously wrote about how to compute a bootstrap confidence interval in Base SAS. As a reminder, the bootstrap method consists of the following steps: Compute the statistic of interest for the original data Resample B times from the data to form B bootstrap samples. B is usually a large
A SAS customer asked how to use SAS to conduct a Z test for the equality of two proportions. He was directed to the SAS Usage Note "Testing the equality of two or more proportions from independent samples." The note says to "specify the CHISQ option in the TABLES statement
