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One of my New Year's resolutions is to learn a new area of statistics. I'm off to a good start, because I recently investigated an issue which started me thinking about spatial statistics—a branch of statistics that I have never formally studied. During the investigation, I asked myself: Given an
As Cat Truxillo points out in her recent blog post, some SAS procedures require data to be in a "long" (as opposed to "wide") format. Cat uses a DATA step to convert the data from wide to long format. Although there is nothing wrong with this approach, I prefer to
I sing in the SAS-sponsored VocalMotion show choir. It's like an adult version of Glee, except we have more pregnancies and fewer slushie attacks. For many musical numbers, the choreographer arranges the 20 performers on stage in an orderly manner, such as four rows of five singers. But every once
I have recently had the great opportunity to be a part of a very special project called the North Carolina Bio-Preparedness Collaborative (NCB-Prepared) It is a public-private partnership that includes the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), North Carolina State University, and SAS, with support from the US
A histogram displays the number of points that fall into a specified set of bins. This blog post shows how to efficiently compute a SAS/IML vector that contains those counts. I stress the word "efficiently" because, as is often the case, a SAS/IML programmer has a variety of ways to
Have you ever wanted to compute the exact value of a really big number such as 200! = 200*199*...*2*1? You can do it—if you're willing to put forth some programming effort. This blog post shows you how. Jiangtang Hu's recent blog discusses his quest to compute large factorials in many programming languages.
Who doesn’t like bargains? I’m sure you will all agree that good quality at a next-to-nothing cost is irresistible. My recent Dollarama run had me ecstatic about the gloves that come in all colours, styles and sizes for just over a dollar. (Fact: big retail stores charge over 10 times
The other day I needed to check that a sequence of numerical values was in strictly increasing order. My first thought was to sort the values and compare the sorted and original values, but I quickly discarded that approach because it does not detect duplicate values in a montonic (nondecreasing)
It has become routine. For the 14th straight time – which is every year since its first publication in 1998 – SAS has made the Fortune “100 Best Companies to Work For” list. This includes eight appearances in the top ten, and in 2011, for the second year in a
In a previous post, I described ways to create SAS/IML vectors that contain uniformly spaced values. The methods did not involve writing any loops. This post describes how to perform a similar operation: creating evenly spaced values on a two-dimensional grid. The DATA step solution is simple, but an efficient
Tomorrow I'll be taking a few hours away from work to build something important: the self-esteems of a handful of middle-school-aged children. I'm volunteering as a judge in a middle-school science fair. And even though I'm not a scientist ("computer science" isn't a category), I understand enough about physical science
"What is the chance that two people in a room of 20 share initials?" This was the question posed to me by a colleague who had been taking notes at a meeting with 20 people. He recorded each person's initials next to their comments and, upon editing the notes, was
A colleague posted some data on his internal SAS blog about key trends in the US Mobile phone industry, as reported by comScore. He graciously shared the data so that I could create a graph that visualizes the trends. The plot visualizes trends in the data: the Android phone is
I think being greedy is a virtue – especially when you are trying to feed your intellectual curiosity! You can satiate that hunger at SAS Global Forum, which offers an unlimited buffet of thought-provoking ideas and discussions. To give you a glimpse of what to expect at Las Vegas this
When your data are in rows, but you need them in columns, use the matrix transpose function or operator. The same advice applies to data in columns that you want to be in rows. For example, the vectors created by the DO function and the index creation operator are row