The DO Loop
Statistical programming in SAS with an emphasis on SAS/IML programsSimulation studies are used for many purposes, one of which is to examine how distributional assumptions affect the coverage probability of a confidence interval. This article describes the "zipper plot," which enables you to compare the coverage probability of a confidence interval when the data do or do not follow
I often claim that the "natural syntax" of the SAS/IML language makes it easy to implement an algorithm or statistical formula as it appears in a textbook or journal. The other day I had an opportunity to test the truth of that statement. A SAS programmer wanted to implement the
About once a month I see a question on the SAS Support Communities that involves what I like to call "computations with combinations." A typical question asks how to find k values (from a set of p values) that maximize or minimize some function, such as "I have 5 variables,
One of my favorite magazines, Significance, printed an intriguing image of a symmetric matrix that shows repetition in a song's lyrics. The image was created by Colin Morris, who has created many similar images. When I saw these images, I knew that I wanted to duplicate the analysis in SAS!
Welcome to my annual Pi Day post. Every year on March 14th (written 3/14 in the US), geeky mathematicians and their friends celebrate "all things pi-related" because 3.14 is the three-decimal approximation to pi. Pi is a mathematical constant that never changes. Pi is the same value today as it
Data analysts often fit a probability distribution to data. When you have access to the data, a common technique is to use maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to compute the parameters of a distribution that are "most likely" to have produced the observed data. However, how can you fit a distribution