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 […]

NOTE: Comment-Driven Design

I started the NOTE: blog in 2009. It was a successor to the highly-popular email newsletter that I used to send between 2001 and 2006. At its height, the email newsletter had 4,000+ subscribers. One of the regular features was “SAS With Style”. Below…

Inverse hyperbolic functions in SAS

I was recently asked, “Does SAS support computing inverse hyperbolic trigonometric functions?” I was pretty sure that I had used the inverse hyperbolic trig functions in SAS, so I was surprised when I read the next sentence: “I ask because I saw a Usage Note that says these functions are […]

NOTE: More on Ishikawa

I recently mentioned the use of Ishikawa diagrams for assistance with problem solving. I have frequently found them to be of value. However, what I had never realised, until my friend Chris Brooks pointed it out, is that there’s a PROC ISHI…