Once again I rediscovered something that I once knew, but had forgotten. Fortunately, this blog is a good place to share little code snippets that I don't want to forget. I needed to compute the diagonal elements of a product of two matrices. In symbols, I have an nxp matrix,
In simulation studies, the response variable is often a binary (or Bernoulli) variable. Often 1 is used to indicate "success" (or the occurrence of an event) whereas 0 indicates "failure" (or the absence of an event). For example, the following SAS/IML statements define a vector x of zeros and ones:
The other day someone posted the following question to the SAS-L discussion list: Is there a SAS PROC out there that takes a multi-category discrete variable with character categories and converts it to a single numeric coded variable (not a set of dummy variables) with the character categories assigned as
I got an email asking the following question: In the following program, I don't know how many variables are in the data set A. However, I do know that the variable names are X1–Xk for some value of k. How can I read them all into a SAS/IML matrix when
Here's a quick tip to keep in mind when you write SAS/IML programs: although the SAS/IML documentation lists about 300 functions that are built into the SAS/IML language, you can also call hundreds of functions in Base SAS. Furthermore, you can pass in SAS/IML vectors for arguments to the functions.
Did you know that you can define "abbreviations" in the SAS enhanced editor? These handy little shortcuts can save you a lot of typing. For example, I have an abbreviation for the string _iml. Whenever I type _iml, the editor prompts me to replace those four characters with the following
Here is a little trick to file away. Given a row vector of zeros and ones, thought of as representing a number in base 2, the following SAS/IML statements compute the decimal value of that vector. proc iml; x = {1 0 0 1 1 1}; /* number in base
In SAS/IML 9.22 and beyond, you can call the R statistical programming language from within a SAS/IML program. The syntax is similar to the syntax for calling SAS from SAS/IML: You use a SUBMIT statement, but add the R option: SUBMIT / R. All statements in the program between the
In SAS/IML 9.22 and beyond, you can call any SAS procedure, DATA step, or macro from within a SAS/IML program. The syntax is simple: place a SUBMIT statement prior to the SAS statements and place an ENDSUBMIT statement after the SAS statements. This enables you to call any SAS procedure
I received the following email: Dear Dr. Wicklin, Why doesn't SYMPUT work in IML? In the DATA step, I can say CALL SYMPUT("MyMacro", 5) but this doesn't work in IML! Frustrated Dear Frustrated, The SYMPUT subroutine does work in SAS/IML software! However, the second argument to SYMPUT must be a
