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Rick WicklinMay 27, 2014 3

An easy way to generate a vector of letters

A little-known but useful feature of SAS/IML 12.3 (which was released with SAS 9.4) is the ability to generate a vector of lowercase or uppercase letters by using the colon operator (:). Many SAS/IML programmers use the colon operator to generate a vector of sequential integers: proc iml; x =

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Rick WicklinMay 14, 2014 0

Tips for concatenating strings in SAS/IML

Last week, as part of an article on how spammers generate comments for blogs, I showed how to generate random messages by using the CATX function in the DATA step. In that example, the strings were scalar quantities, but you can also concatenate vectors of strings in the SAS/IML language.

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Rick WicklinMay 5, 2014 8

Blanks and lengths: Understanding SAS/IML character vectors

SAS programmers are probably familiar with how SAS stores a character variable in a data set, but how is a character vector stored in the SAS/IML language? Recall that a character variable is stored by using a fixed-width storage structure. In the SAS DATA step, the maximum number of characters

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Rick WicklinApril 14, 2014 2

Summary of new features in SAS/IML 12.1

I enjoy blogging about new functionality in the SAS/IML language because I can go into more depth and provide more complicated examples than the SAS/IML documentation. Today's article is a summary of all of my posts about features that were added to SAS/IML 12.1, which shipped in August 2012 as

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Rick WicklinApril 9, 2014 6

The Hilbert matrix: A vectorized construction

The Hilbert matrix is the most famous ill-conditioned matrix in numerical linear algebra. It is often used in matrix computations to illustrate problems that arise when you compute with ill-conditioned matrices. The Hilbert matrix is symmetric and positive definite, properties that are often associated with "nice" and "tame" matrices. The

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Rick WicklinMarch 31, 2014 13

SAS/IML available to all students through SAS Analytics U

When spontaneous applause broke out during Dr. Jim Goodnight's presentation at the opening session of SAS Global Forum 2014, I was one of the people cheering the loudest. The SAS CEO had just announced free software for students and professors at universities around the world. The SAS University Edition will

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Rick WicklinMarch 17, 2014 0

Finding elements in one vector that are not in another vector

The SAS/IML language has several functions for finding the unions, intersections, and differences between sets. In fact, two of my favorite utility functions are the UNIQUE function, which returns the unique elements in a matrix, and the SETDIF function, which returns the elements that are in one vector and not

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Rick WicklinMarch 10, 2014 6

How to get started with SAS: Free videos for beginners

On most Mondays I blog about a function, programming technique, or resource that is useful for programmers who are getting started with SAS software. Recently I learned that my colleagues in the SAS education division have been hard at work developing a series of short videos that explain basic tasks

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Rick WicklinMarch 3, 2014 1

Aborting a SAS/IML program upon encountering an error

A colleague sent me an interesting question: What is the best way to abort a SAS/IML program? For example, you might want to abort a program if the data is singular or does not contain a sufficient number of observations or variables. As a first attempt would be to try

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Rick WicklinFebruary 19, 2014 22

Techniques for scoring a regression model in SAS

My previous post described how to use the "missing response trick" to score a regression model. As I said in that article, there are other ways to score a regression model. This article describes using the SCORE procedure, a SCORE statement, the relatively new PLM procedure, and the CODE statement.

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