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Programming Tips

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinOctober 23, 2019 2

Perform matrix computations when the matrices don't fit in memory

In response to a recent article about how to compute the cosine similarity of observations, a reader asked whether it is practical (or even possible) to perform these types of computations on data sets that have many thousands of observations. The problem is that the cosine similarity matrix is an

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinOctober 2, 2019 25

Compute the geometric mean, geometric standard deviation, and geometric CV in SAS

I frequently see questions on SAS discussion forums about how to compute the geometric mean and related quantities in SAS. Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are sometimes confusing or even wrong. In addition, some published papers and web sites that claim to show how to calculate the geometric mean

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 30, 2019 4

What is a geometric mean?

There are several different kinds of means. They all try to find an average value from among a set of numbers. Although the most popular mean is the arithmetic mean, the geometric mean can be useful for problems in statistics, finance, and biology. A common application of the geometric mean

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 25, 2019 2

Solve many optimization problems

One of the strengths of the SAS/IML language is its flexibility. Recently, a SAS programmer asked how to generalize a program in a previous article. The original program solved one optimization problem. The reader said that she wants to solve this type of problem 300 times, each time using a

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Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 16, 2019 0

The Hull moving average: Implement a custom time series smoother in SAS

A moving average is a statistical technique that is used to smooth a time series. My colleague, Cindy Wang, wrote an article about the Hull moving average (HMA), which is a time series smoother that is sometimes used as a technical indicator by stock market traders. Cindy showed how to

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Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 5, 2019 4

Use cosine similarity to make recommendations

When you order an item online, the website often recommends other items based on your purchase. In fact, these kinds of "recommendation engines" contributed to the early success of companies like Amazon and Netflix. SAS uses a recommender engine to suggest articles on the SAS Support Communities. Although recommender engines

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Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 3, 2019 8

Cosine similarity of vectors

An important application of the dot product (inner product) of two vectors is to determine the angle between the vectors. If u and v are two vectors, then cos(θ) = (u ⋅ v) / (|u| |v|) You could apply the inverse cosine function if you wanted to find θ in

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 28, 2019 2

Annotate features of a schematic box plot in SGPLOT

A SAS programmer asked an intriguing question on the SAS Support Communities: Can you use SAS to create a graph that shows how the elements in a box-and-whiskers plot relate to the data? The SAS documentation has several examples that explain how to read a box plot. One of the

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 26, 2019 9

Conditionally append observations to a SAS data set

Most SAS programmers know how to use PROC APPEND or the SET statement in DATA step to unconditionally append new observations to an existing data set. However, sometimes you need to scan the data to determine whether or not to append observations. In this situation, many SAS programmers choose one

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 21, 2019 0

Two tips for optimizing a function that has a restricted domain

An important application of nonlinear optimization is finding parameters of a model that fit data. For some models, the parameters are constrained by the data. A canonical example is the maximum likelihood estimation of a so-called "threshold parameter" for the three-parameter lognormal distribution. For this distribution, the objective function is

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