The DO Loop
Statistical programming in SAS with an emphasis on SAS/IML programs
The SAS/IML language and the MATLAB language are similar. Both provide a natural syntax for performing high-level computations on vectors and matrices, including basic linear algebra subroutines. Sometimes a SAS programmer will convert an algorithm from MATLAB into SAS/IML. Because the languages are not identical, I am sometimes asked, "what
Have you ever tried to type a movie title by using a TV remote control? Both Netflix and Amazon Video provide an interface (a virtual keyboard) that enables you to use the four arrow keys of a standard remote control to type letters. The letters are arranged in a regular
Given a rectangular grid with unit spacing, what is the expected distance between two random vertices, where distance is measured in the L1 metric? (Here "random" means "uniformly at random.") I recently needed this answer for some small grids, such as the one to the right, which is a 7 x 6
Continued fractions show up in surprising places. They are used in the numerical approximations of certain functions, including the evaluation of the normal cumulative distribution function (normal CDF) for large values of x (El-bolkiny, 1995, p. 75-77) and in approximating the Lambert W function, which has applications in the modeling
In the SAS/IML language, you can only concatenate vectors that have conforming dimensions. For example, to horizontally concatenate two vectors X and Y, the symbols X and Y must have the same number of rows. If not, the statement Z = X || Y will produce an error: ERROR: Matrices
A SAS programmer recently asked me how to compute a kernel regression in SAS. He had read my blog posts "What is loess regression" and "Loess regression in SAS/IML" and was trying to implement a kernel regression in SAS/IML as part of a larger analysis. This article explains how to