Overview of SAS/IML Studio

SAS/IML Studio provides a powerful programming environment that enables you to combine SAS/IML statements with calling SAS procedures, and also enables you to create and manipulate the attributes of dynamically linked statistical graphics. SAS/IML Studio also provides a GUI that enables you to visualize the results of statistical analyses. Furthermore, SAS/IML Studio provides several prewritten analyses (all implemented in IMLPlus, the SAS/IML Studio programming language) that you can access from the Analysis menu.

This chapter describes how you can use the SAS/IML Studio GUI for exploratory data analysis. The example in this chapter uses a sample data set, Hurricanes, that is distributed with SAS/IML Studio. The example covers the following activities:

1. Opening a data set. When you open a data set, the data are displayed in a data table. Features of the data table are described in Chapter 4, Interacting with the Data Table.

2. Creating graphical views of the data, such as a bar chart, a histogram, a box plot, and a scatter plot. SAS/IML Studio plots and data tables are collectively known as data views. All data views are dynamically linked, which means that observations that you select in one data view are displayed as selected in all other views of the same data. Several chapters of this book are devoted to describing the SAS/IML Studio plots and how you can interact with them. Especially relevant to this example are Chapter 5, Exploring Data in One Dimension, and Chapter 6, Exploring Data in Two Dimensions.

3. Modeling relationships between variables. The example uses the correlation analysis and the polynomial regression analysis. These analyses are described further in Chapter 20, Data Smoothing: Polynomial Regression, and Chapter 25, Multivariate Analysis: Correlation Analysis.