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.
As my colleague Margaret Crevar recently wrote, it is useful to know how long SAS programs take to run. Margaret and others have written about how to use the SAS FULLSTIMER option to monitor the performance of the SAS system. In fact, SAS distributes a macro that enables you to
You've probably heard of a random walk, but have you heard about the drunkard's walk? I've previously written about how to simulate a one-dimensional random walk in SAS. In the random walk, you imagine a person who takes a series of steps where the step size and direction is a
SAS/IML software is used by many SAS programmers, primarily for creating custom algorithms and macros that implement statistical analyses that are not built into any SAS procedure. I know that PROC IML is used regularly by pharmaceutical companies, by the financial and insurance industries, and by researchers in medical colleges
When you count the outcomes of an experiment, you do not always observe all of the possible outcomes. For example, if you roll a six-sided die 10 times, it might be that the "1" face does not appear in those 10 rolls. Obviously, this situation occurs more frequently with small
When I am computing with SAS/IML matrices and vectors, I often want to label the columns or rows so that I can better understand the data. The labels are called headers, and the COLNAME= and ROWNAME= options in the SAS/IML PRINT statement enable you to add headers for columns and
In my article about finding an initial guess for root-finding algorithms, I stated that Newton's root-finding method "might not converge or might converge to a root that is far away from the root that you wanted to find." A reader wanted more information about that statement. I have previously shown
A SAS programmer asked an interesting question on a SAS Support Community. The programmer had a nonlinear function with 12 parameters. He also had file that contained 4,000 lines, where each line contained values for the 12 parameters. In other words, the file specified 4,000 different functions. The programmer wanted
One of the fundamental principles of computer programming is to break a task into smaller subtasks and to modularize the program by encapsulating each subtask into its own function. I have written many blog posts over the years about how to define and use functions in the SAS/IML language. I
A feature of SAS/IML 13.2 (shipped with SAS 9.4m2, Aug 2014) is the ability to execute SAS/IML statements that are in a file. The feature is implemented by the new EXECUTEFILE subroutine. This feature is similar to the CALL EXECUTE statement. The difference is that the EXECUTEFILE subroutine reads, parses,
"Daddy, help! Help me! Come quick!" I heard my daughter's screams from the upstairs bathroom and bounded up the stairs two at a time. Was she hurt? Bleeding? Was the toilet overflowing? When I arrived in the doorway, she pointed at the wall and at the floor. The wall was
