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.
Did you know that you can use the POLYGON statement in PROC SGPLOT to draw a map? The graph at the left shows the 48 contiguous states of the US, overlaid with markers that indicate the locations of major cities. The plot was created by using the POLYGON statement, which
In many procedures, the ID statement is used to identify observations by specifying an identifying variable, such as a name or a patient ID. In many regression procedures, you can specify multiple ID variables, and all variables are copied into output data sets that contain observation-wise statistics such as predicted
How much does this big pumpkin weigh? One of the cafeterias at SAS invited patrons to post their guesses on an internal social network at SAS. There was no prize for the correct guess; it was just a fun Halloween-week activity. I recognized this as an opportunity to apply the
In SAS, the DATA step and PROC SQL support mnemonic logical operators. The Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT are used for evaluating logical expressions. The comparison operators are EQ (equal), NE (not equal), GT (greater than), LT (less than), GE (greater than or equal), and LE (less than or
Statistical programmers often need to evaluate complicated expressions that contain square roots, logarithms, and other functions whose domain is restricted. Similarly, you might need to evaluate a rational expression in which the denominator of the expression can be zero. In these cases, it is important to avoid evaluating a function
Sometimes I can't remember where I put things. If I lose my glasses or garden tools, I am out of luck. But when I can't remember where I put some data, I have SAS to help me find it. When I can remember the name of the data set, my
Every year near Halloween I write a trick-and-treat article in which I demonstrate a simple programming trick that is a real treat to use. This year's trick features two of my favorite functions, the CUSUM function and the LAG function. By using these function, you can compute the rows of
The FREQ procedure in SAS supports computing exact p-values for many statistical tests. For small and mid-sized problems, the procedure runs very quickly. However, even though PROC FREQ uses efficient methods to avoid unnecessary computations, the computational time required by exact tests might be prohibitively expensive for certain tables. If
Did you know that the FREQ procedure in SAS can compute exact p-values for more than 20 statistical tests and statistics that are associated with contingency table? Mamma mia! That's a veritable smorgasbord of options! Some of the tests are specifically for one-way tables or 2 x 2 tables, but many apply
How do you simulate a contingency table that has a specified row and column sum? Last week I showed how to simulate a random 2 x 2 contingency table when the marginal frequencies are specified. This article generalizes to random r x c frequency tables (also called cross-tabulations) that have the same marginal row
