SAS provides procedures to fit common probability distributions to sample data. You can use PROC UNIVARIATE in Base SAS or PROC SEVERITY in SAS/ETS software to estimate the distribution parameters for approximately 20 common distributions, including normal, lognormal, beta, gamma, and Weibull. Since there are infinitely many distributions, you may eventually need to fit a distribution that SAS does not natively support. There are three often-used methods for fitting the parameters of a distri...| The DO Loop
Many common probability distributions contain terms that increase or decrease quickly, such as the exponential function and factorials. The numerical evaluation of these quantities can result in numerical overflow (or underflow). This is why we often work on the logarithmic scale: on the log-scale, the numerical computations for equations such as the log-likelihood function are more stable. This article demonstrates a different trick that is useful for computing a sum of exponential terms. I ...| The DO Loop
Newton's method was in the news this week.| The DO Loop