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Monte Carlo distribution of skewness statistic (B=10000, N=100)

Rick WicklinOctober 28, 2020 4

The sample skewness is a biased statistic

The skewness of a distribution indicates whether a distribution is symmetric or not. The Wikipedia article about skewness discusses two common definitions for the sample skewness, including the definition used by SAS. In the middle of the article, you will discover the following sentence: In general, the [estimators]are both biased

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Graphical comparison of two methods for estimating confidence intervals of eigenvalues of a correlation matrix

Rick WicklinOctober 26, 2020 3

Confidence intervals for eigenvalues of a correlation matrix

A fundamental principle of data analysis is that a statistic is an estimate of a parameter for the population. A statistic is calculated from a random sample. This leads to uncertainty in the estimate: a different random sample would have produced a different statistic. To quantify the uncertainty, SAS procedures

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinOctober 19, 2020 5

Generate random points in a triangle

How can you efficiently generate N random uniform points in a triangular region of the plane? There is a very cool algorithm (which I call the reflection method) that makes the process easy. I no longer remember where I saw this algorithm, but it is different from the "weighted average"

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Analytics | Data Visualization

Rick WicklinOctober 14, 2020 1

A continuous band plot for visualizing uncertainty in regression predictions

A previous article discusses the confidence band for the mean predicted value in a regression model. The article shows a "graded confidence band plot," which I saw in Claus O. Wilke's online book, Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Section 16.3). It communicates uncertainty in the predictions. A graded band plot is

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Analytics | Data Visualization

Rick WicklinOctober 12, 2020 1

Visualize uncertainty in regression predictions

You've probably seen many graphs that are similar to the one at the right. This plot shows a regression line overlaid on a scatter plot of some data. Given a value for the independent variable (x), the regression line gives the best prediction for the mean of the response variable

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinOctober 7, 2020 0

The Poisson-binomial distribution for hundreds of parameters

A previous article shows how to use a recursive formula to compute exact probabilities for the Poisson-binomial distribution. The recursive formula is an O(N2) computation, where N is the number of parameters for the Poisson-binomial (PB) distribution. If you have a distribution that has hundreds (or even thousands) of parameters,

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 28, 2020 0

The Poisson-binomial distribution

The Poisson-binomial distribution is a generalization of the binomial distribution. For the binomial distribution, you carry out N independent and identical Bernoulli trials. Each trial has a probability, p, of success. The total number of successes, which can be between 0 and N, is a binomial random variable. The distribution

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Analytics | Learn SAS

Rick WicklinSeptember 21, 2020 0

Regression with inequality constraints on parameters

A previous article discussed how to solve regression problems in which the parameters are constrained to be a specified constant (such as B1 = 1) or are restricted to obey a linear equation such as B4 = –2*B2. In SAS, you can use the RESTRICT statement in PROC REG to

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 16, 2020 1

Restricted least squares regression in SAS

A data analyst recently asked a question about restricted least square regression in SAS. Recall that a restricted regression puts linear constraints on the coefficients in the model. Examples include forcing a coefficient to be 1 or forcing two coefficients to equal each other. Each of these problems can be

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 10, 2020 0

Iterative proportional fitting in SAS

I previously wrote about the RAS algorithm, which is a simple algorithm that performs matrix balancing. Matrix balancing refers to adjusting the cells of a frequency table to match known values of the row and column sums. Ideally, the balanced matrix will reflect the structural relationships in the original matrix.

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