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Analytics | Learn SAS

Rick WicklinJune 3, 2020 3

How to estimate the difference between percentiles

I recently read an article that describes ways to compute confidence intervals for the difference in a percentile between two groups. In Eaton, Moore, and MacKenzie (2019), the authors describe a problem in hydrology. The data are the sizes of pebbles (grains) in rivers at two different sites. The authors

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Analytics | Data Visualization

Rick WicklinMay 13, 2020 3

Find points where a regression curve has zero slope

This article shows how to find local maxima and maxima on a regression curve, which means finding points where the slope of the curve is zero. An example appears at the right, which shows locations where the loess smoother in a scatter plot has local minima and maxima. Except for

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinMay 11, 2020 0

Cubic spline interpolation in SAS

I recently showed how to use linear interpolation in SAS. Linear interpolation is a common way to interpolate between a set of planar points, but the interpolating function (the interpolant) is not smooth. If you want a smoother interpolant, you can use cubic spline interpolation. This article describes how to

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Analytics | Data Visualization

Rick WicklinMay 6, 2020 3

What does 'flatten the curve' mean? To which curve does it apply?

During this coronavirus pandemic, there are many COVID-related graphs and curves in the news and on social media. The public, politicians, and pundits scrutinize each day's graphs to determine which communities are winning the fight against coronavirus. Interspersed among these many graphs is the oft-repeated mantra, "Flatten the curve!" As

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinMay 4, 2020 0

Linear interpolation in SAS

SAS programmers sometimes ask about ways to perform one-dimensional linear interpolation in SAS. This article shows three ways to perform linear interpolation in SAS: PROC IML (in SAS/IML software), PROC EXPAND (in SAS/ETS software), and PROC TRANSREG (in SAS/STAT software). Of these, PROC IML Is the simplest to use and

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Analytics

Rick WicklinApril 29, 2020 1

How many imputations are enough?

Recently I read an excellent blog post by Paul von Hippel entitled "How many imputations do you need?". It is based on a paper (von Hippel, 2018), which provides more details. Suppose you are faced with data that has many missing values. One way to address the missing values is

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinApril 27, 2020 2

The circular law for eigenvalues

I've previously written about how to generate points that are uniformly distributed in the unit disk. A seemingly unrelated topic is the distribution of eigenvalues (in the complex plane) of various kinds of random matrices. However, I recently learned that these topics are somewhat related! A mathematical result called the

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Analytics | Data Visualization

Rick WicklinApril 22, 2020 1

Visualize the case fatality rate for COVID-19 in US counties

A previous article describes the funnel plot (Spiegelhalter, 2005), which can identify samples that have rates or proportions that are much different than expected. The funnel plot is a scatter plot that plots the sample proportion of some quantity against the size of the sample. The variance of the sample

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Analytics | Data Visualization

Rick WicklinApril 20, 2020 5

Use a funnel plot to visualize rates: The case fatality rate for COVID-19 in North Carolina counties

Death is always a difficult topic to discuss, and death has been in the news a lot during this tragic coronavirus pandemic. Many news stories focus on states, counties, or cities that have the most cases or the most deaths. A related statistic is the case fatality rate, which is

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Analytics | Data Visualization

Rick WicklinApril 1, 2020 6

Estimates of doubling time for exponential growth

During an epidemic, such as the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, the media often shows graphs of the cumulative numbers of confirmed cases for different countries. Often these graphs use a logarithmic scale for the vertical axis. In these graphs, a straight line indicates that new cases are increasing at an

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