ODS statements are global SAS statements. As such, you can put them anywhere in your SAS program. For maximum readability, many SAS programmers agree that most ODS statements should appear outside procedures in "open" SAS code. For example, most programmers agree that the following statements should appear outside of procedures:
In statistics, distances between observations are used to form clusters, to identify outliers, and to estimate distributions. Distances are used in spatial statistics and in other application areas. There are many ways to define the distance between observations. I have previously written an article that explains Mahalanobis distance, which is
Someone recently asked a question on the SAS Support Communities about estimating parameters in ridge regression. I answered the question by pointing to a matrix formula in the SAS documentation. One of the advantages of the SAS/IML language is that you can implement matrix formulas in a natural way. The
Argh! I've just spilled coffee on output that shows the least squares coefficients for a regression model that I was investigating. Now the parameter estimate for the intercept is completely obscured, although I can still see the parameter estimates for the coefficients of the continuous explanatory variable. What can I
Last week there was an interesting question posted to the "Stat-Math Statistics" group on LinkedIn. The original question was a little confusing, so I'll state it in a more general form: A population is normally distributed with a known mean and standard deviation. A sample of size N is drawn
Last week the SAS Training Post blog posted a short article on an easy way to find variables in common to two data sets. The article used PROC CONTENTS (with the SHORT option) to print out the names of variables in SAS data sets so that you can visually determine
A while ago I saw a blog post on how to simulate Bernoulli outcomes when the probability of generating a 1 (success) varies from observation to observation. I've done this often in SAS, both in the DATA step and in the SAS/IML language. For example, when simulating data that satisfied
It's the start of a new year. Have you made a resolution to be a better data analyst? A better SAS statistical programmer? To learn more about multivariate statistics? What better way to start the New Year than to read (or re-read!) the top 12 articles for statistical programmers from
Frequently someone will post a question to the SAS Support Community that says something like this: I am trying to do [statistical task]and SAS issues an error and reports that my correlation matrix is not positive definite. What is going on and how can I complete [the task]? The statistical
The other day I was constructing covariance matrices for simulating data for a mixed model with repeated measurements. I was using the SAS/IML BLOCK function to build up the "R-side" covariance matrix from smaller blocks. The matrix I was constructing was block-diagonal and looked like this: The matrix represents a
