The DO Loop
Statistical programming in SAS with an emphasis on SAS/IML programs
It is time for Pi Day, 2017! 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. This year I use SAS software to show an amazing fact: you can find your birthday

I recently needed to solve a fun programming problem. I challenge other SAS programmers to solve it, too! The problem is easy to state: Given a long sequence of digits, can you write a program to count how many times a particular subsequence occurs? For example, if I give you

Suppose you have several discrete variables. You want to conduct a frequency analysis of these variables and print the results, but ONLY for variables that have three or more levels. In other words, you want to conditionally display some results, but you don't know which variables satisfy the condition until

After reading my article about how to use BY-group processing to run 1000 regression models, a SAS programmer asked whether it is possible to reorder the output of a BY-group analysis. The answer is yes: you can use the DOCUMENT procedure to replay a portion of your output in any

Monte Carlo techniques have many applications, but a primary application is to approximate the probability that some event occurs. The idea is to simulate data from the population and count the proportion of times that the event occurs in the simulated data. For continuous univariate distributions, the probability of an

Longtime SAS programmers know that the SAS DATA step and SAS procedures are very tolerant of typographical errors. You can misspell most keywords and SAS will "guess" what you mean. For example, if you mistype "PROC" as "PRC," SAS will run the program but write a warning to the log: