Covariance, correlation, and distance matrices are a few examples of symmetric matrices that are frequently encountered in statistics. When you create a symmetric matrix, you only need to specify the lower triangular portion of the matrix. The VECH and SQRVECH functions, which were introduced in SAS/IML 9.3, are two functions
A variance-covariance matrix expresses linear relationships between variables. Given the covariances between variables, did you know that you can write down an invertible linear transformation that "uncorrelates" the variables? Conversely, you can transform a set of uncorrelated variables into variables with given covariances. The transformation that works this magic is
The other day I encountered the following SAS DATA step for generating three normally distributed variables. Study it, and see if you can discover what is unnecessary (and misleading!) about this program: data points; drop i; do i=1 to 10; x=rannor(34343); y=rannor(12345); z=rannor(54321); output; end; run; The program creates the
