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Distribution of Lead Levels in Flint, Michigan, in 71 Water Samples

Rick WicklinMay 17, 2017 11

The April 2017 issue of Significance magazine features a cover story by Robert Langkjaer-Bain about the Flint (Michigan) water crisis. For those who don't know, the Flint water crisis started in 2014 when the impoverished city began using the Flint River as a source of city water. The water was

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Analytics

Split data into groups that have the same mean and variance

Rick WicklinMay 1, 2017 15

Split data into groups that have the same mean and variance

A frequently asked question on SAS discussion forums concerns randomly assigning units (often patients in a study) to various experimental groups so that each group has approximately the same number of units. This basic problem is easily solved in SAS by using PROC SURVEYSELECT or a DATA step program. A

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Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinApril 26, 2017 0

Visualize a design matrix

Most SAS regression procedures support a CLASS statement which internally generates dummy variables for categorical variables. I have previously described what dummy variables are and how are they used. I have also written about how to create design matrices that contain dummy variables in SAS, and in particular how to

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Analytics | Data Visualization

Rick WicklinApril 24, 2017 1

Visualize an ANOVA with two-way interactions

There are several ways to visualize data in a two-way ANOVA model. Most visualizations show a statistical summary of the response variable for each category. However, for small data sets, it can be useful to overlay the raw data. This article shows a simple trick that you can use to

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Optimal value of quadratic function of two variables

Rick WicklinApril 12, 2017 3

Quadratic optimization in SAS

At SAS Global Forum last week, I saw a poster that used SAS/IML to optimized a quadratic objective function that arises in financial portfolio management (Xia, Eberhardt, and Kastin, 2017). The authors used the Newton-Raphson optimizer (NLPNRA routine) in SAS/IML to optimize a hypothetical portfolio of assets. The Newton-Raphson algorithm

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Analytics | Data Visualization

Rick WicklinFebruary 20, 2017 48

The distribution of colors for plain M&M candies

Many introductory courses in probability and statistics encourage students to collect and analyze real data. A popular experiment in categorical data analysis is to give students a bag of M&M® candies and ask them to estimate the proportion of colors in the population from the sample data. In some classes,

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinMarch 30, 2012 6

Generate a random matrix with specified eigenvalues

In a previous post I showed how to implement Stewart's (1980) algorithm for generating random orthogonal matrices in SAS/IML software. By using the algorithm, it is easy to generate a random matrix that contains a specified set of eigenvalues. If D = diag(λ1, ..., λp) is a diagonal matrix and

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Analytics

Rick WicklinSeptember 3, 2010 3

Hello, World!

When programmers begin learning a new computer language, the first program they write is often one that prints the text “Hello, World!” Successfully writing a Hello World program assures the programmer that the software is successfully installed and that all necessary features are working: parsers, compilers, linkers, and so on.

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