Purpose of This Book

The purpose of this book is to teach SAS/STAT users how to use SAS/IML Studio in conjunction with SAS/STAT procedures in order to explore data and visualize statistical models. It assumes that you are familiar with using Base SAS software and SAS/STAT procedures such as FREQ, PRINT, REG, and KDE. The examples in this book do not require knowledge of the SAS/IML language. A goal of this book is to enable SAS/STAT programmers to write programs in SAS/IML Studio as quickly as possible.

In particular, this book focuses on how to create dynamically linked graphs so you can more easily formulate, visualize, evaluate, and revise statistical models. If you already know how to write DATA and PROC statements to perform a certain analysis, you can add a few IMLPlus statements to create graphs for visualizing the results. Thus, you need to learn only a few new commands and techniques in order to get started with IMLPlus programming.

This book is one of three documents about SAS/IML Studio. You can learn how to use the SAS/IML Studio GUI to conduct exploratory data analysis and standard statistical analyses in the SAS/IML Studio User's Guide. That book also shows you how to perform many of the tasks in this chapter by using menus in the SAS/IML Studio GUI. You can learn more advanced programming commands and techniques from the SAS/IML Studio online Help, which you can display by selecting Help Help Topics from the main menu.