Posts Tagged ‘ Getting Started ’

I have previously discussed how to define functions that safely evaluate their arguments and return a missing value if the argument is not in the domain of the function. The canonical example is the LOG function, which is defined only for positive arguments. For example, to evaluate the LOG function

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Many intervals in statistics have the form p ± δ, where p is a point estimate and δ is the radius (or half-width) of the interval. (For example, many two-sided confidence intervals have this form, where δ is proportional to the standard error.) Many years ago I wrote an article

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SAS programmers who have experience with other programming languages sometimes wonder whether the SAS language supports statements that are equivalent to the "break" and "continue" statements in other languages. The answer is yes. The LEAVE statement in the SAS DATA step is equivalent to the "break" statement. It provides a

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A common question on SAS discussion forums is how to repeat an analysis multiple times. Most programmers know that the most efficient way to analyze one model across many subsets of the data (perhaps each country or each state) is to sort the data and use a BY statement to

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In the beginning SAS created procedures and output. The output was formless and void. Then SAS said, "Let there be ODS," and there was ODS. Customers saw that ODS was good, and SAS separated the computation from the display and management of output. The preceding paragraph oversimplifies the SAS Output

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In some applications, you need to optimize a linear objective function of many variables, subject to linear constraints. Solving this problem is called linear programming or linear optimization. This article shows two ways to solve linear programming problems in SAS: You can use the OPTMODEL procedure in SAS/OR software or

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SAS formats are flexible, dynamic, and have many uses. For example, you can use formats to count missing values and to change the order of a categorical variable in a table or plot. Did you know that you can also use SAS formats to bin a numerical variable into categories?

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Last week I read an interesting paper by Bob Rodriguez: "Statistical Model Building for Large, Complex Data: Five New Directions in SAS/STAT Software." In it, Rodriguez summarizes five modern techniques for building predictive models and highlights recent SAS/STAT procedures that implement those techniques. The paper discusses the following high-performance (HP)

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