Are any of these stellar books on your shopping list? Our 10 latest titles cover the spectrum from analytics to programming to statistics—and come from industry leaders, as well as top SAS and JMP experts. If you like to sample before you buy, you’ll find an accompanying free excerpt with
Writing a book about SAS (or any computer software) is both gratifying and frustrating. It's gratifying because there are so many SAS users in the world, and it feels good when you can share your expertise with them. It's also gratifying to have a volume that you can point to
Do you analyze data for a city, town, or utility? ... And do you wonder how you can graphically analyze your data? Here are 24 examples to help you! Click the screen-captures below to go to the samples page, where you can see the full-size interactive samples (and also download
Each year my siblings choose names for a Christmas gift exchange. It is not unusual for a sibling to pick her own name, whereupon the name is replaced into the hat and a new name is drawn. In fact, that "glitch" in the drawing process was a motivation for me
Dear friends of SAS Publications, there are only a few weeks left in 2013 and we are all busy with year-end work and holiday preparations. Good to see that I get help from my two books, Data Preparation for Analytics Using SAS and Data Quality for Analytics Using SAS who
As the “Year of Statistics” comes to a close, I write this blog in support of the many statisticians who carefully fulfil their analysis tasks day by day, and to defend what may appear to be demanding behavior when it comes to data requirements. How do statisticians get this reputation? Are we
There are 2 kinds of people in the world -- those who dread change, and those who look forward to it. Which kind of person are you, when it comes to upgrading your SAS software?!? With most software (such as Windows OS, Facebook, Gmail, etc) I tend to fall into
Instituting an analytics program in which actionable insight is delivered to a business consumer will be successful if those consumers are aware of what they need to do to improve their processes and reap the benefits. As we have explored over the past few posts, success in the use of
Another day, another scam defrauding insurers and governments. For purposes of full disclosure, the case I'm highlighting today comes from Washington's Labor and Industries (L&I), the agency where I formerly worked and headed up fraud prevention efforts, and the investigation dates back to my time there. During my time there,
“Dear Cat, In a repeated measures drug study, I am unsure what to do with the baseline measurement. Since it is one of the time points in my study, I feel like I should use it as one of the dependent variable measurements. But I have seen analyses where baseline
If you write an n x p matrix from PROC IML to a SAS data set, you'll get a data set with n rows and p columns. For some applications, it is more convenient to write the matrix in a "long format" with np observations and three columns. The first
The data quality and data governance community has a somewhat disconcerting habit to want to append the word “quality” to every phrase that has the word “data” in it. So it is no surprise that the growing use of the phrase “big data” has been duly followed by claims of
The holiday season is here, and you're probably wondering how to shop for that picky SAS Enterprise Guide user on your gift list. I've got a few ideas for you, and the price is right! Here are links to 11 custom tasks that are free to download, easy to install,
For several years, there has been interest in calling R from SAS software, primarily because of the large number of special-purpose R packages. The ability to call R from SAS has been available in SAS/IML since 2009. Previous blog posts about R include a video on how to call R
This week's SAS tip is from Randy Collica and his book Customer Segmentation and Clustering Using SAS Enterprise Miner, Second Edition. Randy, a Senior Solutions Architect for SAS, is extremely knowledgeable. His current interests include clustering and ensemble models, knowledge and data engineering, missing data and imputation, and text mining techniques for
Wavelet analysis is an exciting and relatively new field of study that enables one to extract underlying patterns either from spatially varying or temporally varying data. Pixel values representing the relative brightness and color that constitute an image are an example of spatially varying data, and daily variations of financial
Organizations often complain that they are drowning in data but starving for information. What they are seeking is insight and foresight from the treasure chest of raw and transactional data they already have combined with other information widely available. Business intelligence (BI) software tools have been presumed as the solution;
"Big data isn't useful for investment purposes." So said my friend Walt during one of our recent arguments discussions. By way of background, Walt is not an über-successful 70-year-old investor who earned his chops well before the advents of Twitter, Facebook and their ilk. Rather, he's a man of a similar age to
With the others, I filed into the school gymnasium, my super zoom camera lens at the ready and a nervous smile on my face. Across the room, I caught a glimpse of my unsmiling daughter, and my apprehension grew about how this awards day program would play out for her.
When I call R from within the SAS/IML language, I often pass parameters from SAS into R. This feature enables me to write general-purpose, reusable, modules that can analyze data from many different data sets. I've previously blogged about how to pass values to SAS procedures from PROC IML by
I've been a busy Jedi the last few months and have spent the bulk of my non-teaching days learning new Jedi SAS tricks to share with you. The finishing touches are going on to our brand-new, one and a half day DS2 Programming: Essentials class. It's rolling out on December 16
Each year, I'm excited to see the awards nominations for Data Steward of the Year come in. It's not just because we enjoy seeing the program grow each year (which is true, based on the number of nominations we receive). It's also because of the variety of the nominations –
In using a vector-matrix language such as SAS/IML, MATLAB, or R, one of the challenges for programmers is learning how to vectorize computations. Often it is not intuitive how to program a computation so that you avoid looping over the rows and columns of a matrix. However, there are a
Forecasting Support Systems (FSS) – essentially, decision support systems for forecasters – are being given increasing scrutiny in forecasting circles, including our recent half-dozen articles in Foresight. Additionally this year, there has been a special issue of the International Journal of Forecasting focused on the topic. Keith Ord and
Am 13.11. fand in Berlin zum zweiten Mal der Trendkongress des Verbandes der deutschen IT- und Telekommunikationsindustrie BITKOM statt. Fast 900 Gäste folgten dem Ruf in die trendige "STATION" in Berlin - und natürlich kann ein solches Event heutzutage nicht ohne Big Data auskommen. Doch vielleicht wurde hier wirklich ein
Are you looking for a flexible training option to increase or brush up on your statistical skills using JMP? In the video below, I introduce our newest e-course, JMP Software: ANOVA and Regression.
Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the Wisconsin Illinois SAS Users Conference in Des Plaines, IL. The conference included a full day of presentations, followed by 2 days of training. This conference attracted a very lively group of around 150 SAS users from the surrounding area. Presenters included
I'm always trying to find new uses for SAS - this time I've written a proof-of-concept that shows how you might use SAS to create charts that test for color blindness. If nothing else, I think it's a fun example :) First, I did a Google search, and looked at several
While sorting through an old pile of papers, I discovered notes from a 2012 SAS conference that I had attended. Next to the abstract for one presentation, I had scrawled a note to myself that read "BLOG about the incomplete beta function!" Okay, Rick, whatever you say! In statistics, the
My daughter's middle school math class recently reviewed how to compute the greatest common factor (GCF) and the least common multiple (LCM) of a set of integers. (The GCF is sometimes called the greatest common divisor, or GCD.) Both algorithms require factoring integers into a product of primes. While helping
