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.
Last week I showed a timeline of living US presidents. The number of living presidents is constant during the time interval between inaugurations and deaths of presidents. The data was taken from a Wikipedia table (shown below) that shows the number of years and days between events. This article shows
A SAS customer asked how to simulate data from a three-parameter lognormal distribution as specified in the PROC UNIVARIATE documentation. In particular, he wanted to incorporate a threshold parameter into the simulation. Simulating lognormal data is easy if you remember an important fact: if X is lognormally distributed, then Y=log(X)
Quick! What is the next term in the numerical sequence 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 4, ...? If you said '3', then you must be an American history expert, because that sequence represents the number of living US presidents beginning with Washington's inauguration on 30APR1789 and
If a financial analyst says it is "likely" that a company will be profitable next year, what probability would you ascribe to that statement? If an intelligence report claims that there is "little chance" of a terrorist attack against an embassy, should the ambassador interpret this as a one-in-a-hundred chance,
A frequently asked question on SAS discussion forums concerns randomly assigning units (often patients in a study) to various experimental groups so that each group has approximately the same number of units. This basic problem is easily solved in SAS by using PROC SURVEYSELECT or a DATA step program. A
Most SAS regression procedures support a CLASS statement which internally generates dummy variables for categorical variables. I have previously described what dummy variables are and how are they used. I have also written about how to create design matrices that contain dummy variables in SAS, and in particular how to
There are several ways to visualize data in a two-way ANOVA model. Most visualizations show a statistical summary of the response variable for each category. However, for small data sets, it can be useful to overlay the raw data. This article shows a simple trick that you can use to
Restricted cubic splines are a powerful technique for modeling nonlinear relationships by using linear regression models. I have attended multiple SAS Global Forum presentations that show how to use restricted cubic splines in SAS regression procedures. However, the presenters have all used the %RCSPLINE macro (Frank Harrell, 1988) to generate
A reader commented on last week's article about constructing symmetric intervals. He wanted to know if I created it in SAS. Yes, the graph, which illustrates the so-called 68-95-99.7 rule for the normal distribution, was created by using several statements in the SGPLOT procedure in Base SAS The SERIES statement
At SAS Global Forum last week, I saw a poster that used SAS/IML to optimized a quadratic objective function that arises in financial portfolio management (Xia, Eberhardt, and Kastin, 2017). The authors used the Newton-Raphson optimizer (NLPNRA routine) in SAS/IML to optimize a hypothetical portfolio of assets. The Newton-Raphson algorithm
