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Frequently someone will post a question to the SAS Support Community that says something like this: I am trying to do [statistical task]and SAS issues an error and reports that my correlation matrix is not positive definite. What is going on and how can I complete [the task]? The statistical
David Sedaris, a native of Raleigh, NC, who has made it big as a humorist and author, recently posted his “Ideal Bookshelf” on Facebook. The picture was created by a company called Ideal Bookshelf, which “paints portraits of people through the spines of their favorite books: the ones that changed
“So, you work for SAS?” asked my co-passenger. I was on the plane to Baltimore to attend my first NESUG conference and the tag on my laptop bag was the clue. I happened to be seated next to a SAS user who was familiar with ODS Graphics. I ended up
Several weeks ago, South Carolina was the victim of what some experts believe to be the largest cyber-attack against a state tax department in history. Approximately 3.6 million personal South Carolina income tax returns were exposed, and nearly 657,000 businesses compromised, in an international hacking attack. Coincidentally, SAS and the SC
Jenine Milum is the Vice President and Analytics Manager at Wells Fargo Bank. About 10 years ago, she learned a valuable, but little known solution to cutting the CPU processing time when dealing with large data sets. "We were processing log activity for our website on a daily basis," says Milum,
What I love most about my job is the travel. The blind guy gets around. (We're talking a lot.) And wherever he goes, I go. Sadly, Ed thinks that people are excited because he’s shown up. WRONG! I'm the rock star on this team.
Have you used the MEANS procedure to calculate frequencies: for several variables in the same step? without sorting the data first? without checking for missing values? using the TYPE statement and the CLASS statement together? At the recent SouthEastern SAS Users Group conference, Janet Willis shared what can go wrong
Recently, top executives from SAS gathered in Washington, DC with customers and other interested parties to discuss the potential impact of "big data" and high-performance analytics on the U.S. government. Topics included cyber-attack strategies, health care, bio-surveillance, border security and of course, fraud and improper payments. On the heels of
This week's SAS tip is from Susan Slaughter and Lora Delwiche's bestselling The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.2. Susan and Lora are revered in the user community. And their work continues to help SAS users throughout the world. I hope you'll also find value in this week's excerpt. The following excerpt is from
Kirk Paul Lafler, Software Intelligence Corporation, has written four SAS books and more than 500 peer-reviewed papers - 19 of which were awarded Best Contributed Papers or Poster, so I’m going to believe him when he says that he’s figured out a thing or two about tuning SAS systems.
A recent question by a user lead led me to experiment with what is often referred to as conditional highlighting. The user wanted to display a bar chart of response by year, where each bar is colored by year, and show a cross hatch pattern on the bars where the
Have you heard the expression "Talk Turkey"? Well then, what better (tongue-in-cheek) thing to do around the Thanksgiving holiday, than talk some turkey using SAS Graphs! ;) I don't usually decorate my graphs with images and pictures (they typically make the graph more difficult to read), but when it comes
For some odd reason, the open-source Apache Hadoop ecosystem consists of cleverly named components that seem to have escaped from the Central Park Zoo. You may be aware that the little yellow elephant named Hadoop was actually a stuffed toy that Doug Cutting’s son owned. (Doug is the co-creator of
The LOC function is one of the most important functions in the SAS/IML language. The LOC function finds elements of a vector or matrix that satisfy some condition. For example, if you are going to apply a logarithmic transform to data, you can use the LOC function to find all
As the holidays approach, we’ll all have some down-time to catch up on personal and professional reading, hopefully cozied up by a fire with a cup of hot chocolate in hand. While most books regarding data-driven decision making and value-added analyses can be pretty heavy, I’d like to suggest two