The DO Loop
Statistical programming in SAS with an emphasis on SAS/IML programs
This article introduces the iml action, which is available in SAS Viya 3.5. The iml action supports most of the same syntax and functionality as the SAS/IML matrix language, which is implemented in PROC IML. With minimal changes, most programs that run in PROC IML also run in the iml

A SAS customer asked how to specify interaction effects between a classification variable and a spline effect in a SAS regression procedure. There are at least two ways to do this. If the SAS procedure supports the EFFECT statement, you can build the interaction term in the MODEL statement. For

I recently read an article that describes ways to compute confidence intervals for the difference in a percentile between two groups. In Eaton, Moore, and MacKenzie (2019), the authors describe a problem in hydrology. The data are the sizes of pebbles (grains) in rivers at two different sites. The authors

In a previous article, I discussed the definition of the Kullback-Leibler (K-L) divergence between two discrete probability distributions. For completeness, this article shows how to compute the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two continuous distributions. When f and g are discrete distributions, the K-L divergence is the sum of f(x)*log(f(x)/g(x)) over all

The Kullback–Leibler divergence is a measure of dissimilarity between two probability distributions. An application in machine learning is to measure how distributions in a parametric family differ from a data distribution. This article shows that if you minimize the Kullback–Leibler divergence over a set of parameters, you can find a

If you have been learning about machine learning or mathematical statistics, you might have heard about the Kullback–Leibler divergence. The Kullback–Leibler divergence is a measure of dissimilarity between two probability distributions. It measures how much one distribution differs from a reference distribution. This article explains the Kullback–Leibler divergence and shows