Don’t worry! This is not an excerpt from a romantic love letter. The title of this blog post is an allusion to my talk on "Missing Values", at the A2013 conference in June in London. There is not much time for emotions: dealing with missing values in analysis is not
Welcome to Part 2 of the value-added Myth Busters blog series…have you heard this one before? Educators serving high-achieving students are often concerned that their students’ entering achievement level makes it more difficult for them to show growth. “How can my students show growth if they are already earning high
In statistics, distances between observations are used to form clusters, to identify outliers, and to estimate distributions. Distances are used in spatial statistics and in other application areas. There are many ways to define the distance between observations. I have previously written an article that explains Mahalanobis distance, which is
“It’s not about how much money you make but to work on stuff that matters," according to Tim O’Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media. At the recent Tools of Change conference, Tim O’Reilly mentioned during his keynote that writers tend to be motivated to work on “stuff that matters.” Through SAS
Are you a new SAS user who isn't sure where to begin? Have no fear, because you're not alone. Here at SAS, we often receive questions from people who need help getting started with the software. Getting Started with SAS is the topic of a SAS Talks session that I
It is easy to use the SGPLOT procedure in SAS to plot the graph of a well-behaved continuous function: just create a data set of the (x,y) values on some domain and use the SERIES statement to connect the points. However, to plot the graph of a discontinuous function correctly
Gestern erschienen bei Heise: Ein kontroverser Beitrag zum Thema Big Data. Auch das IT-Magazin Silicon findet 400 kritische Worte zum Phänomen. Beide Artikel sind lesenswert, aber die Darstellung ist in einigen Punkten nicht vollständig und gerne würde ich noch ein paar Punkte zur Betrachtung von Big Data ergänzen. Big Data
Revenge of the Nerds was so 1980s. Now it's a new world order: math geeks and athletes are working together. I'm not talking just about what happens when data nerds observe, analyze, and predict sports outcomes -- as they do in March Madness with their "bracketology". That's compelling, but your
A big part of "winning" these days (be it sports or a business) is performing analytics better than your competition. This is demonstrated in awe-inspiring fashion in the book (and movie) "Moneyball." And on that topic, I'd like to show you a few ways SAS can be used to analyze sports data
Personally, I love studies. They help put things into context, and when done well, provide an independent and hopefully unbiased view of the forces that shape our lives. They are also a great way to see government funds used in strange ways. For example, the new NIOSH (National Institute for
It’s early March and one of these days, the snow will melt here in Minnesota, the ice will disappear from the lakes, and spring will arrive. On my list of things to do this spring is a third edition of SAS Macro Programming Made Easy. It’s time to update the
Someone recently asked a question on the SAS Support Communities about estimating parameters in ridge regression. I answered the question by pointing to a matrix formula in the SAS documentation. One of the advantages of the SAS/IML language is that you can implement matrix formulas in a natural way. The
Last week I delivered a SAS Talks session: Introduction to Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide (click to watch it). I promised that I would share a collection of resources where you can learn more information. First, here is a round-up of the custom tasks that I mentioned, with links
One purpose of this International Year of Statistics is to spread the word that the field of statistics benefits society. As part of the International Year, many organizations, including SAS and the American Statistical Association (ASA), are turning to history to illustrate how statistics is vital to the health and
La Economía Digital, uno de los pilares de la Estrategia Digital Nacional (EDN), consiste estimular el aumento de la productividad y el desarrollo de nuevas empresas a través de la implementación de las tecnologías digitales, las cuales representan una inmensa área de oportunidad para consolidar la relación entre cliente y empresa. Para
I've heard many customers ask "Can SAS do/use/handle census block maps?" My answer was "of course!" ... but I never really had any examples to show/prove that. Well, now I do! :) First, you need to locate & download the shape files for the census blocks you're interested in plotting. For
In the past five years, value-added models have been increasingly adopted by states to support various teaching effectiveness policies. As educators make the paradigm shift from looking at only achievement data to incorporating growth data, many misconceptions have developed. Compounding this issue is the fact that not all value-added and
My wife rescued a dog a couple of years ago from a rural North Carolina rest stop . We named her "DOTi" in honor of the Department of Transportation. It took a while for us to get into the swing of being responsible owners; sometimes the first to leave for
This post is another in my series about creating apps with SAS Integration Technologies, a topic that I'm preparing for SAS Global Forum 2013. In this article, I'll describe how to use Windows PowerShell to connect to a remote SAS Workspace, run a SAS program, and retrieve the results. This
Argh! I've just spilled coffee on output that shows the least squares coefficients for a regression model that I was investigating. Now the parameter estimate for the intercept is completely obscured, although I can still see the parameter estimates for the coefficients of the continuous explanatory variable. What can I
There is a well recognized phenomenon that combining forecasts, derived from different methods using different sources of information, can improve forecast accuracy. This approach, sometimes called "ensemble forecasting," is available in SAS Forecast Server. Per Scott Armstrong's review of 57 studies on combining forecasts, "the combined forecast can be better
Die CeBIT stand in diesem Jahr unter dem Leitthema Shareconomy. Bitkom-Präsident Dieter Kempf verkündete direkt zum Auftakt der Cebit: „Shareconomy betrifft die gesamte Gesellschaft“ und „Wir wechseln von einer Welt des Besitzens in eine Welt des Teilens.“ Soll uns nach Einführung des Tempolimits nun auch die Freude am persönlichen Besitz
Last week there was an interesting question posted to the "Stat-Math Statistics" group on LinkedIn. The original question was a little confusing, so I'll state it in a more general form: A population is normally distributed with a known mean and standard deviation. A sample of size N is drawn
Vier Videos beschreiben das Phänomen Big Data, skizzieren tatsächliche und mögliche Anwendungsfälle und zeigen an Praxisbeispielen, wie Unternehmen große Datenmengen bereits jetzt effektiv nutzen. Zur Playlist bei Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdMxv2SumIKtzvevr2oSBNUHxxbGWFMd0
Last year I shared this popular tip for counting how many times a web link has been shared on Twitter or Facebook. I use this technique daily to report on the social media "popularity" of our blog articles at SAS. I wanted to add LinkedIn into the mix. Like Twitter
There is something for everyone at SAS Global Forum 2013. I like to attend presentations in the Statistics and Data Analysis track and talk with SAS customers in the SAS Support and Demo Area. But one activity that I enjoy the most is to stroll through the poster area and
I, (INSERT NAME HERE), being a data scientist of moral standing and noble intentions, do solemnly swear the following on pain of being banned from ever using a logistic regression again: When faced with an individual untrained in advanced statistics or machine learning, I shall not belittle, condescend, or otherwise
Last time we began to look at the opportunity for integrating a newly developed master data repository with existing business applications supported by a data warehouse. That meant understanding the requirements for integration and verifying that those requirements are met.
SAS announced yesterday that Michigan will use the SAS Fraud Framework for Government to, initially, combat fraud, waste and abuse in the state’s unemployment insurance and food stamp programs. Those two programs are good focus areas and I’m confident they will lead to the state recovering funds, avoiding losses and
I have encountered quite a few companies that are now anticipating the move of as many of their source systems as possible into SAP. I think this is probably a good decision for quite a few of these organizations. However, in doing so, we must keep or create data management
