Tag: Efficiency

Rick Wicklin 0
Simulating data for a logistic regression model

In my book Simulating Data with SAS, I show how to use the SAS DATA step to simulate data from a logistic regression model. Recently there have been discussions on the SAS/IML Support Community about simulating logistic data by using the SAS/IML language. This article describes how to efficiently simulate

Rick Wicklin 0
Never multiply with a large diagonal matrix

I love working with SAS Technical Support because I get to see real problems that SAS customers face as they use SAS/IML software. The other day I advised a customer how to improve the efficiency of a computation that involved multiplying large matrices. In this article I describe an important

Tim Arthur 0
How is being agile different from doing agile?

There’s a reason SAS is a leader in so many different areas, and the adoption of Agile Scrum is no exception. “Scrum” gets its namesake from rugby, and more specifically, the name of a play where all team members lock arms and wrestle for the ball so that the game

Learn SAS
Rick Wicklin 0
Oh, those pesky temporary variables!

The SAS/IML language secretly creates temporary variables. Most of the time programmers aren't even aware that the language does this. However, there is one situation where if you don't think carefully about temporary variables, your program will silently produce an error. And as every programmer knows, silent wrong numbers are

Rick Wicklin 0
Remove or keep: Which is faster?

In a recent article on efficient simulation from a truncated distribution, I wrote some SAS/IML code that used the LOC function to find and exclude observations that satisfy some criterion. Some readers came up with an alternative algorithm that uses the REMOVE function instead of subscripts. I remarked in a

Rick Wicklin 0
Efficient acceptance-rejection simulation

A few days ago on the SAS/IML Support Community, there was an interesting discussion about how to simulate data from a truncated Poisson distribution. The SAS/IML user wanted to generate values from a Poisson distribution, but discard any zeros that are generated. This kind of simulation is known as an

Rick Wicklin 0
Using macro loops for simulation

Last week I wrote an article in which I pointed out that many SAS programmers write a simulation in SAS by writing a macro loop. This approach is extremely inefficient, so I presented a more efficient technique. Not only is the macro loop approach slow, but there are other undesirable

1 2