Overview of Working with Matrices

SAS/IML software provides many ways to create matrices. You can create matrices by doing any of the following:

• entering data as a matrix literal

• using assignment statements

• using functions that generate matrices

• creating submatrices from existing matrices with subscripts

• using SAS data sets (see Chapter 7, Working with SAS Data Sets, for more information)

Chapter 3, Understanding the SAS/IML Language, describes some of these techniques.

After you define matrices, you have access to many operators and functions for forming matrix expressions. These operators and functions facilitate programming and enable you to refer to submatrices. This chapter describes how to work with matrices in the SAS/IML language.