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Improving teacher effectiveness is no simple task. Whether a part of a formal evaluation system or for formative feedback, looking at student growth data can be a valuable part of the development process for teachers and administrators. Lubbock Independent School District (Lubbock ISD) uses SAS® EVAAS to improve teaching and

In my book Simulating Data with SAS, I specify how to generate lognormal data with a shape and scale parameter. The method is simple: you use the RAND function to generate X ~ N(μ, σ), then compute Y = exp(X). The random variable Y is lognormally distributed with parameters μ

We're entering the busy season for forecasting events, and here is the current calendar: Analytics2014 - Frankfurt The European edition of Analytics2014 kicks off tomorrow in Frankfurt, Germany. Five hundred of the leading thinkers and doers in the analytics profession hook up for two full days of interaction and learning.

This blog post describes a neat example of some cool SAS capabilities, and also teaches you a little more about the state where SAS software is made... Here at the SAS headquarters in Cary, NC, the main TV news channel is WRAL TV5. And my favorite segment during the news is Scott

Insights from decision trees and other basic analytic techniques show that you don’t always need complex analytics to solve business problems and add value. This was the message from Dr. James (Jim) Foster, Director of Research and Process Development, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), at last month’s inaugural IE Group ‘Manufacturing Analytics

Principle 9: Risk management reports should communicate information in a clear and concise manner. Reports should be easy to understand yet comprehensive enough to facilitate informed decision-making. Reports should include meaningful information tailored to the needs of the recipients. While the data management and data aggregation principles have been heavily

Sometimes you have data in SAS/IML vectors that you need to write to a SAS data set. By default, no formats are associated with the variables that you create from SAS/IML vectors. However, some variables (notably dates, times, and datetimes) should have formats associated with the data values. You can

I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard this question at SAS Global Forum: "So, does this SAS Studio thing replace SAS Enterprise Guide?" SAS Studio is a pretty big deal. It's groundbreaking in several ways: It's a web-based programming interface to SAS. It runs in your

Frequently you may want to modify the default colors, line patterns and symbols that are displayed on the graphics output produced by the Statistical Graphics, or SG procedures, and the Graph Template Language, GTL. Enhancements in SAS 9.4 have made that task much easier! In the examples below, we will look

Whether you’re counting carbs for glucose management, crunching calories for weight loss or beefing up your protein intake to build muscle mass, food tracking apps can be an invaluable resource for your health and fitness goals. A novelty a few years ago, these apps are now in abundance giving us

A little-known but useful feature of SAS/IML 12.3 (which was released with SAS 9.4) is the ability to generate a vector of lowercase or uppercase letters by using the colon operator (:). Many SAS/IML programmers use the colon operator to generate a vector of sequential integers: proc iml; x =

So far in our Ask the Statistician blog and video series, we have heard responses from statisticians at the Analytics 2013 conference about: The many ways statistics benefit their organizations. The types of statistical analyses used to solve business issues. Best practices for explaining results. How they put statistical

I’ve recently had the opportunity to learn a little more about administering SAS Visual Analytics. The sessions introduced me to two new GUI interfaces that simplify the work for SAS administrators. In my last post, I shared how to load data into memory using the SAS Visual Data Builder. After
Do you ever look at a chart or graph and think about what it’s really trying to reveal? All the time, right? Visualizations are useful because they allow us to analyze information much quicker than if we were to look at the raw data by itself. I say this with

Principle 7: Accuracy - Risk management reports should accurately and precisely convey aggregated risk data and reflect risk in an exact manner. Reports should be reconciled and validated. Successful demonstration of Principle 7 requires senior management to rely upon the information presented in risk reporting. Since forward-looking strategic decisions are