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Why do people have 12 pairs of shoes and no health insurance? - Perhaps the consumer price index data can help explain it ... Great minds think alike - I recently saw a plot of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) data that Layne Ainsworth had created, and it reminded me
This SAS tutorial video will show you how to generate plots for two continuous numeric variables with Base SAS. Basic scatter plots, linear or curvilinear regression lines, confidence intervals or ellipses, and multiple plot overlays are demonstrated. To learn more about this topic, check out our SAS Programming 1: Essentials
It was just a couple of years ago that folks were skeptical about the term "data scientist". It seemed like a simple re-branding of an established job role that carried titles such as "business analyst", "data manager", or "reporting specialist". But today, it seems that the definition of the "Data
In my recent post on how to understand character vectors in SAS/IML, I left out an important topic: How can you allocate a character vector of a specified length? In this article, "length" means the maximum number of characters in an element, not the number of elements in a vector.
In my previous post in the Ask the Statistician interview series, we heard from statisticians at the Analytics 2013 conference discuss the how their statistical results are put into action within their organizations. Now let’s learn more about their specific examples of success they have had utilizing these results. Check out
Can the selection of the axis range in a graph influence how you perceive the data? Let's find out with a "Labor Participation Rate" graph ... Medical doctors have traditionally taken the Hippocratic Oath, swearing to practice medicine honestly. I have often thought that people creating graphs should swear a
It’s an understatement to say there are many Base SAS procedures! Some procedures may be used for basic report writing. Other procedures may be used to perform statistical analysis. Some have similar functions. Others are unique in the output that they can produce. Which procedure you choose generally depends on
An epic clash across the continent of Europe Every year since 1956 the nations of Europe (and now beyond) have come together to decide who has the best popular song. The contest has launched the careers of many global pop stars, most notably the unforgettable Swedish foursome, ABBA. No one
I'm currently working on a large project for a SAS customer. The project comprises many activities and phases, so there is a need to track progress on many different levels. During a recent meeting the project manager announced, "I'm putting together a status deck, and I'll include some Harvey Balls
Many years ago I was a SAS administrator for both a UNIX server and a LINUX server. I had a lot of syntax memorized and a lot of commands at my fingertips. If I ever mis-typed a command, I’d have to try again. I remember writing plenty of batch scripts
Last week Chris Hemedinger posted an article about spam that is sent to SAS blogs and discussed how anti-spam software helps to block spam. No algorithm can be 100% accurate at distinguishing spam from valid comments because of the inherent trade-off between specificity and sensitivity in any statistical test. Therefore,
All my friends seem to be having twins these days (below is a picture of my friend Holly's twins, for example) - I wondered if I could use SAS to analyze this twinning trend ... When I was growing up, way back in the day, twins seemed to be rarity.
All Analytics spoke with several leaders at the recent SAS Global Forum Executive Conference on what it means to build an analytics culture. Here’s a video of those conversations. The video features several sections related to building an analytics culture: Kim Nevala, Director of Business Strategy for the SAS Best
Which would you rather see - a table of numbers, or a nice graph? When it comes to unemployment numbers, I vote for the graph! The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) provides several tables of data about the U.S. workforce. One such table (Table A-15) provides several different alternative measures
SAS programmers are probably familiar with how SAS stores a character variable in a data set, but how is a character vector stored in the SAS/IML language? Recall that a character variable is stored by using a fixed-width storage structure. In the SAS DATA step, the maximum number of characters