The tail of a probability distribution is an important notion in probability and statistics, but did you know that there is not a rigorous definition for the "tail"? The term is primarily used intuitively to mean the part of a distribution that is far from the distribution's peak or center.
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. --Mark Twain In the popular Cryptoquote puzzle, you are presented with an enciphered version of a quote by a famous person. One of the appeals of the puzzle for me is reading the deciphered quote, such
SAS/IML 13.1 includes a handy function for programmers who write a lot of modules. The PARENTNAME function obtains the name of the symbol that was passed in as a parameter to a user-defined module. How is this useful? Well, suppose that you want to create a SAS/IML module that prints
In response to my recent post about how to use the PALETTE function in SAS/IML to generate color ramps, a reader wrote the following: The PALETTE function returns an array of hexadecimal values such as CXF03B20. For those of us who think about colors as RGB values, is there an
Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble. Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I For the cyptanalyst or recreational puzzle solver, "double double" does not lead to toil or trouble. Just the opposite: The occurrence of a double-letter bigram in an enciphered word puzzle is quite fortunate. Certain double
Have you ever looked as a statistical graph that uses bright garish colors and thought, "Why in the world did that guy choose those awful colors?" Don't be "that guy"! Your choice of colors for a graph can make a huge difference in how well your visualization is perceived by
In a previous article I introduced the HEATMAPCONT subroutine in SAS/IML 13.1, which makes it easy to visualize matrices by using heat maps with continuous color ramps. This article introduces a companion subroutine. The HEATMAPDISC subroutine, which also requires SAS/IML 13.1, is designed to visualize matrices that have a small
In last week's article about the distribution of letters in an English corpus, I presented research results by Peter Norvig who used Google's digitized library and tabulated the frequency of each letter. Norvig also tabulated the frequency of bigrams, which are pairs of letters that appear consecutively within a word.
While at JSM 2014 in Boston, a statistician asked me whether it was possible to create a "customized bin plot" in SAS. When I asked for more information, she told me that she has a large data set. She wants to visualize the data, but a scatter plot is not
The skewness of a distribution indicates whether a distribution is symmetric or not. A distribution that is symmetric about its mean has zero skewness. In contrast, if the right tail of a unimodal distribution has more mass than the left tail, then the distribution is said to be "right skewed"
