An important concept in multivariate statistical analysis is the Mahalanobis distance. The Mahalanobis distance provides a way to measure how far away an observation is from the center of a sample while accounting for correlations in the data. The Mahalanobis distance is a good way to detect outliers in multivariate
Statisticians often emphasize the dangers of extrapolating from a univariate regression model. A common exercise in introductory statistics is to ask students to compute a model of population growth and predict the population far in the future. The students learn that extrapolating from a model can result in a nonsensical
Feature generation (also known as feature creation) is the process of creating new features to use for training machine learning models. This article focuses on regression models. The new features (which statisticians call variables) are typically nonlinear transformations of existing variables or combinations of two or more existing variables. This
A frequent topic on SAS discussion forums is how to check the assumptions of an ordinary least squares linear regression model. Some posts indicate misconceptions about the assumptions of linear regression. In particular, I see incorrect statements such as the following: Help! A histogram of my variables shows that they
A SAS programmer recently asked how to interpret the "standardized regression coefficients" as computed by the STB option on the MODEL statement in PROC REG and other SAS regression procedures. The SAS documentation for the STB option states, "a standardized regression coefficient is computed by dividing a parameter estimate by
In a previous article, I showed how to find the intersection (if it exists) between two line segments in the plane. There are some fun problems in probability theory that involve intersections of line segments. One is "What is the probability that two randomly chosen chords of a circle intersect?"
Suppose you want to find observations in multivariate data that are closest to a numerical target value. For example, for the students in the Sashelp.Class data set, you might want to find the students whose (Age, Height, Weight) values are closest to the triplet (13, 62, 100). The way to
Last week I got the following message: Dear Rick: How can I create a normal distribution within a specified range (min and max)? I need to simulate a normal distribution that fits within a specified range. I realize that a normal distribution is by definition infinite... Are there any alternatives,
This article describes the advantages and disadvantages of principal component regression (PCR). This article also presents alternative techniques to PCR. In a previous article, I showed how to compute a principal component regression in SAS. Recall that principal component regression is a technique for handling near collinearities among the regression
How can you specify weights for a statistical analysis? Hmmm, that's a "weighty" question! Many people on discussion forums ask "What is a weight variable?" and "How do you choose a weight for each observation?" This article gives a brief overview of weight variables in statistics and includes examples of
