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Rick WicklinDecember 11, 2019 1

Binary matrices are used for many purposes. I have previously written about how to use binary matrices to visualize missing values in a data matrix. They are also used to indicate the co-occurrence of two events. In ecology, binary matrices are used to indicate which species of an animal are

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Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinNovember 25, 2019 1

Evaluate a quadratic polynomial in SAS

What is an efficient way to evaluate a multivariate quadratic polynomial in p variables? The answer is to use matrix computations! A multivariate quadratic polynomial can be written as the sum of a purely quadratic term (degree 2), a purely linear term (degree 1), and a constant term (degree 0).

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinNovember 18, 2019 4

Create a strip plot in SAS

My colleague, Mike Drutar, recently showed how to create a "strip plot" that shows the distribution of temperatures for each calendar month at a particular location. Mike created the strip plot in SAS Visual Analytics by using a point-and-click interface. This article shows how to create a similar graph by

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinNovember 11, 2019 2

Round to even

In grade school, students learn how to round numbers to the nearest integer. In later years, students learn variations, such as rounding up and rounding down by using the greatest integer function and least integer function, respectively. My sister, who is an engineer, learned a rounding method that rounds half-integers

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Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinNovember 6, 2019 5

What are biplots?

Principal component analysis (PCA) is an important tool for understanding relationships in continuous multivariate data. When the first two principal components (PCs) explain a significant portion of the variance in the data, you can visualize the data by projecting the observations onto the span of the first two PCs. In

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinOctober 30, 2019 0

Compute the first or last day of a month or year

Every year at Halloween, I post an article that shows a SAS trick that is a real treat. This article shows how to use the INTNX function to find dates that are related to a specified date. The INTNX function is a sweet treat, indeed. I previously wrote an article

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinOctober 28, 2019 2

Use regular expressions to specify variable names in SAS

A common task in SAS programming is to specify a list of variables that satisfy some pattern. You can specify lists for the KEEP= or DROP= data set options, and you can use lists of variables on many SAS statements such as the VAR and MODEL statements. Although SAS has

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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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