My article about the difference between CLASS variables and BY variables in SAS focused on SAS analytical procedures. However, the BY statement is also useful in the SAS DATA step where it is used to merge data sets and to analyze data at the group level. When you use the
When I first learned to program in SAS, I remember being confused about the difference between CLASS statements and BY statements. A novice SAS programmer recently asked when to use one instead of the other, so this article explains the difference between the CLASS statement and BY variables in SAS
The SAS language is large. Even after 20+ years of using SAS, there are many features that I have never used. Recently it became necessary for me to learn about DICTIONARY tables in PROC SQL (and the associated SASHELP views) because I needed to programmatically obtain the text for the
A SAS programmer wanted to display a table in which the rows have different formats. An example is shown below. The programmer wanted columns that represent statistics and rows that represent variables. She wanted to display formats (such as DOLLAR) for some variables—but only for certain statistics. For example, the
Have you ever seen the "Fit Summary" table from PROC LOESS, as shown to the right? Or maybe you've seen the "Model Information" table that is displayed by some SAS analytical procedures? These tables provide brief interesting facts about a statistical procedure, hence they are called factoids. In SAS, a
A SAS/IML programmer asked whether you can pass the name of a function as an argument to a SAS/IML module and have the module call the function that is passed in. The answer is "yes." The basic idea is to create a string that represents the function call and then
This article demonstrates a SAS programming technique that I call Kuhfeld's template modification technique. The technique enables you to dynamically modify an ODS template and immediately call the modified template to produce a new graph or table. By following the five steps in this article, you can implement the technique
In a large simulation study, it can be convenient to have a "control file" that contains the parameters for the study. My recent article about how to simulate multivariate normal clusters demonstrates a simple example of this technique. The simulation in that article uses an input data set that contains
In last week's article about the Flint water crisis, I computed the 90th percentile of a small data set. Although I didn't mention it, the value that I reported is different from the the 90th percentile that is reported in Significance magazine. That is not unusual. The data only had
Last week I showed a timeline of living US presidents. The number of living presidents is constant during the time interval between inaugurations and deaths of presidents. The data was taken from a Wikipedia table (shown below) that shows the number of years and days between events. This article shows
