There are two programming tools that I rarely use: the SAS macro language and recursion. The SAS macro language is a tool that enables you to generate SAS statements. I rarely use the SAS macro language because the SAS IML language supports all the functionality required to write complex programs,
In SAS, the easiest way to draw random sampling from data is to use PROC SURVEYSELECT or the SAMPLE function in SAS IML software. I have previously written about how to implement four common sampling schemes by using PROC SURVEYSELECT and the SAMPLE function. The DATA step in SAS is
A previous article shows that you can run a simple (one-variable) isotonic regression by using a quadratic programming (QP) formulation. While I was reading a book about computational geometry, I learned that there is a connection between isotonic regression and the convex hull of a certain set of points. Whaaaaat?
Since the pandemic began in 2020, the SAS IML developers have added about 50 new functions and enhancements to the SAS IML language in SAS Viya. Among these functions are new modern methods for optimization that have a simplified syntax as compared to the older 'NLP' functions that are available
One of the most exciting features of SAS Viya Workbench is that the code editor includes a generative AI component called SAS Viya Copilot. This feature was announced and demonstrated at SAS Innovate 2024. With the Copilot, you can specify a text prompt that generates SAS code. For example, you
In a recent article, I graphed the PDF of a few Beta distributions that had a variety of skewness and kurtosis values. I thought that I had chosen the parameter values to represent a wide variety of Beta shapes. However, I was surprised to see that the distributions were all
The moment-ratio diagram is a tool that is useful when choosing a distribution that models a sample of univariate data. As I show in my book (Simulating Data with SAS, Wicklin, 2013), you first plot the skewness and kurtosis of the sample on the moment-ratio diagram to see what common
A SAS programmer wanted to simulate samples from a family of Beta(a,b) distributions for a simulation study. (Recall that a Beta random variable is bounded with values in the range [0,1].) She wanted to choose the parameters such that the skewness and kurtosis of the distributions varied over range of
A recent article describes how to estimate coefficients in a simple linear regression model by using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). One of the nice properties of an MLE formulation is that you can compare a large model with a nested submodel in a natural way. For example, if you can
A statistical analyst used the GENMOD procedure in SAS to fit a linear regression model. He noticed that the table of parameter estimates has an extra row (labeled "Scale") that is not a regression coefficient. The "scale parameter" is not part of the parameter estimates table produced by PROC REG
