The DO Loop
Statistical programming in SAS with an emphasis on SAS/IML programs
I have previously written about how to plot a discontinuous function in SAS. That article shows how to use the GROUP= option on the SERIES statement to graph a discontinuous function. An alternative approach is to place a missing value for the Y variable at the locations at which the
The REFLINE statement in PROC SGPLOT is one of my favorite ways to augment statistical graphics such as scatter plots, series plots, and histograms. The REFLINE statement overlays a vertical or horizontal reference line on a graph. You can specify the location of the reference lines on the REFLINE statement.
Intuitively, the skewness of a unimodal distribution indicates whether a distribution is symmetric or not. If the right tail has more mass than the left tail, the distribution is "right skewed." If the left tail has more mass, the distribution is "left skewed." Thus, estimating skewness requires some estimates about
The expected value of a random variable is essentially a weighted mean over all possible values. You can compute it by summing (or integrating) a probability-weighted quantity over all possible values of the random variable. The expected value is a measure of the "center" of a probability distribution. You can
When there are two equivalent ways to do something, I advocate choosing the one that is simpler and more efficient. Sometimes, I encounter a SAS program that simulates random numbers in a way that is neither simple nor efficient. This article demonstrates two improvements that you can make to your
The skewness of a distribution indicates whether a distribution is symmetric or not. The Wikipedia article about skewness discusses two common definitions for the sample skewness, including the definition used by SAS. In the middle of the article, you will discover the following sentence: In general, the [estimators]are both biased