One of the joys of statistics is that you can often use different methods to estimate the same quantity. Last week I described how to compute a parametric density estimate for univariate data, and use the parameters estimates to compute the area under the probability density function (PDF). This article
The area under a density estimate curve gives information about the probability that an event occurs. The simplest density estimate is a histogram, and last week I described a few ways to compute empirical estimates of probabilities from histograms and from the data themselves, including how to construct the empirical
Readers' comments indicate that my previous blog article about computing the area under an ROC curve was helpful. Great! There is another common application of numerical integration: finding the area under a density estimation curve. This article provides an overview of density estimation and computes an empirical cumulative density function.
This is Part 4 of my response to Charlie Huang's interesting article titled Top 10 most powerful functions for PROC SQL. As I did for eaerlier topics, I will examine one of the "powerful" SQL functions that Charlie mentions and show how to do the same computation in SAS/IML software.
Recently Charlie Huang showed how to use the SAS/IML language to compute an exponentially weighted moving average of some financial data. In the commentary to his analysis, he said: I found that if a matrix or a vector is declared with specified size before the computation step, the program’s efficiency
A colleague asked, "How can I enumerate the levels of a categorical classification variable in SAS/IML software?" The variable was a character variable with n observations, but he wanted the following: A "look-up table" that contains the k (unique) levels of the variable. A vector with n elements that contains
Over at the SAS/IML Discussion Forum, there have been several posts about how to call a Base SAS functions from SAS/IML when the Base SAS function supports a variable number of arguments. It is easy to call a Base SAS function from SAS/IML software when the syntax for the function
Andrew Ratcliffe posted a fine article titled "Inadequate Mends" in which he extols the benefits of including the name of a macro on the %MEND statement. That is, if you create a macro function named foo, he recommends that you include the name in two places: %macro foo(x); /** define
A fundamental operation in data analysis is finding data that satisfy some criterion. How many people are older than 85? What are the phone numbers of the voters who are registered Democrats? These questions are examples of locating data with certain properties or characteristics. The SAS DATA step has a
In last week's article on how to create a funnel plot in SAS, I wrote the following comment: I have not adjusted the control limits for multiple comparisons. I am doing nine comparisons of individual means to the overall mean, but the limits are based on the assumption that I'm
