A fundamental principle of data analysis is that a statistic is an estimate of a parameter for the population. A statistic is calculated from a random sample. This leads to uncertainty in the estimate: a different random sample would have produced a different statistic. To quantify the uncertainty, SAS procedures

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The triangulation theorem for polygons says that every simple polygon can be triangulated. In fact, if the polygon has V vertices, you can decompose it into V-2 non-overlapping triangles. In this article, a "polygon" always means a simple polygon. Also, a "random point" means one that is drawn at random

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When you use SAS software, you might occasionally encounter an issue with SASUSER. This post helps you debug some of the more common issues: a warning message indicates that SASUSER.TEMPLAT is not an item store or that you cannot write to SASUSER.TEMPLAT a note in the log indicates that SAS

Debugging SASUSER...
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How can you efficiently generate N random uniform points in a triangular region of the plane? There is a very cool algorithm (which I call the reflection method) that makes the process easy. I no longer remember where I saw this algorithm, but it is different from the "weighted average"

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SAS' Leonid Batkhan summarizes a lesser known but useful feature in SAS that allows you to bring Microsoft Excel functions into your SAS programs.

Using Microsoft Excel functions in SAS was published on SAS Users.

A previous article discusses the confidence band for the mean predicted value in a regression model. The article shows a "graded confidence band plot," which I saw in Claus O. Wilke's online book, Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Section 16.3). It communicates uncertainty in the predictions. A graded band plot is

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You've probably seen many graphs that are similar to the one at the right. This plot shows a regression line overlaid on a scatter plot of some data. Given a value for the independent variable (x), the regression line gives the best prediction for the mean of the response variable

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This is a tip for those who use the Metacoda Security Plug-ins Batch Interface for scheduled automation of SAS® metadata security reporting, testing and identity synchronization. You will find this tip useful if you are using the same configuratio...
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This tip was prompted by a question from a Metacoda customer who, having seen a SAS® metadata object id in a log file (e.g. A53GCFFH.AP00001D), wanted to quickly identify what SAS metadata object that id referred to. As a Metacoda Plug-ins user th...
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