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Rick WicklinFebruary 17, 2014 6

The missing value trick for scoring a regression model

A fundamental operation in statistical data analysis is to fit a statistical regression model on one set of data and then evaluate the model on another set of data. The act of evaluating the model on the second set of data is called scoring. One of first "tricks" that I

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Rick WicklinFebruary 10, 2014 6

Define functions with default parameter values in SAS/IML

One of my favorite new features of SAS/IML 12.1 enables you to define functions that contain default values for parameters. This is extremely useful when you want to write a function that has optional arguments. Example: Centering a data vector It is simple to specify a SAS/IML module with a

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Rick WicklinJanuary 13, 2014 1

How to vectorize time series computations

Vector languages such as SAS/IML, MATLAB, and R are powerful because they enable you to use high-level matrix operations (matrix multiplication, dot products, etc) rather than loops that perform scalar operations. In general, vectorized programs are more efficient (and therefore run faster) than programs that contain loops. For an example

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Rick WicklinDecember 16, 2013 5

How to coerce SAS/IML vectors to matrices

Recently a SAS/IML programmer asked a question regarding how to perform matrix arithmetic when some of the data are in vectors and other are in matrices. The programmer wanted to add the following matrices: The problem was that the numbers in the first two matrices were stored in vectors. The

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Rick WicklinDecember 9, 2013 4

Interpreting PROC IML error messages: Matrices do not conform to the operation

When learning a new language, it is important to learn to interpret error messages that come from the language's parser or compiler. Three years ago I blogged about how to interpret SAS/IML error messages. However, many questions have been posted to the SAS/IML Support Community that indicate that some people

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Rick WicklinDecember 2, 2013 4

Write a matrix in the "long form"

If you write an n x p matrix from PROC IML to a SAS data set, you'll get a data set with n rows and p columns. For some applications, it is more convenient to write the matrix in a "long format" with np observations and three columns. The first

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Rick WicklinNovember 18, 2013 1

Vectorizing the construction of a structured matrix

In using a vector-matrix language such as SAS/IML, MATLAB, or R, one of the challenges for programmers is learning how to vectorize computations. Often it is not intuitive how to program a computation so that you avoid looping over the rows and columns of a matrix. However, there are a

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Rick WicklinNovember 10, 2013 0

The GCD and LCM functions in SAS

My daughter's middle school math class recently reviewed how to compute the greatest common factor (GCF) and the least common multiple (LCM) of a set of integers. (The GCF is sometimes called the greatest common divisor, or GCD.) Both algorithms require factoring integers into a product of primes. While helping

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Rick WicklinOctober 30, 2013 3

Square root transformations: How to handle negative data values?

I was looking at someone else's SAS/IML program when I saw this line of code: y = sqrt(x<>0); The statement uses the element maximum operator (<>) in the SAS/IML language to make sure that negative value are never passed to the square root function. This little trick is a real

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Rick WicklinOctober 28, 2013 12

How to order categories in a two-way table with PROC FREQ

If you've ever tried to use PROC FREQ to create a frequency table of two character variables, you know that by default the categories for each variable are displayed in alphabetical order. A different order is sometimes more useful. For example, consider the following two-way table for the smoking status

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