BASE SAS users are already familiar with the autoexec file. This is a .sas file that typically resides in the installation folder of the SAS executable. Instructions for setting it up in UNIX, Windows, and other environments is readily available on the SAS website. In SAS BI configurations there are
I was looking at some SAS documentation when I saw a Base SAS function that I never knew existed. The NWKDOM function returns the date for the nth occurrence of a weekday for the specified month and year. I surely could have used that function last spring when I blogged
This week's tip is from Professor Willbann D. Terpening and his book Statistical Analysis for Business Using JMP. If you're intrigued by the following excerpt, visit Terpening's author page for additional bonus book content. And take a look at his previously featured tip The Student t-distribution, on this blog: The following excerpt is from
Jean Paul Isson (Global Vice President of Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics, Monster Worldwide, Inc.) and Jesse Harriott (Chief Analytics Officer, Constant Contact) know a thing or two about business analytics. With almost 40 years of experience between them, they've handled it all—from web mining solutions to business intelligence, predictive
What do disaster planning and baseball have in common? (Cue Cubs fans, "We plan on every season being a disaster!") Bear with me... Watching game 1 of the World Series reminded me of the time I took my son to AT&T Park to see the Giants play. It was the day
There are a lot of useful probability distributions that are not featured in standard statistical textbooks. Some of them have distinctive names. In the past year I have had contact with SAS customers who use the Tweedie distribution, the slash distribution, and the PERT distribution. Often these distributions are used
Categorical Data Analysis Using SAS has been a favorite among SAS Books readers for quite some time, both as a useful discussion of categorical data analysis techniques as well as an invaluable aid in applying these methods with SAS. Maura Stokes is lead author of the recently published third edition. I
While 2012 has been a very active hurricane season in terms of total storms, the effects on life and property have been relatively small and the need for disaster recovery less than many years. Let's all be thankful for that. Right now, Tropical Storm Sandy is threatening Jamaica and the
What's in a name? As Shakespeare's Juliet said, "That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet." A similar statement holds true for the names of colors in SAS: "Rose" by any other name would look as red! SAS enables you to specify a
According to the Daily Writing Tips blog, describing a thing as "somewhat unique" is bad form. Unique means "one of a kind", so either it is or it is not. The famous example (which the style police will use to chide you) is that you can't have something as "somewhat
The first step is to answer the question of what “real-time” actually means. Depending on the program and industry speed of response, I’ve heard answers that varied from milliseconds for the biggest banks in processing credit card charges to 24 hours for some government programs. A better description of what
In 2011 I came across Shaun Snapp’s blog (scmfocus.com), and immediately took a liking. In particular, I was drawn to his independent and critical tone, and a willingness to challenge the “objectivity” of many commentators and advisors in the forecasting industry. He also takes a reasoned look at the common
I’ve heard it said that the only thing you can count on in life is change. The same can be said of technology. Change is certain, and the rate of change seems to accelerate with each passing year. Change requires us to adapt, but as we race to keep up with
Jim Harris (@ocdqblog) explains the prediction he made about Small Data and VRM.
Sometimes a graph is more interpretable if you assign specific colors to categories. For example, if you are graphing the number of Olympic medals won by various countries at the 2012 London Olympics, you might want to assign the colors gold, silver, and bronze to represent first-, second-, and third-place
Living in the Washington, D.C. area I expect the morning news shows to spend a lot of time reporting on traffic. Crashes on the beltway, downed power lines delaying train service…that’s a normal day. D.C. is the most congested city, according to the Texas Transportation Institute’s annual report.). Commuting to
I've been finishing up just a bit of the "boilerplate" content for my forthcoming book about custom tasks. One of the final tasks is to write the introduction, also known as the "About this Book" section. SAS Press offers a template with examples of a few essential topics to address
Last week I provided the steps for how to go on a date, at least by using dynamic prompts in BI Dashboard. Now that you have seen how to create them, lets discuss making them smarter. For this example, the customer is asking for two prompts to affect a single
The New York Times has an excellent staff that produces visually interesting graphics for the general public. However, because their graphs need to be understood by all Times readers, the staff sometimes creates a complicated infographic when a simpler statistical graph would show the data in a clearer manner. A
Andy Pulkstenis of State Farm thinks it is, stating that this red-headed stepchild among modeling technques is where predictive modeling was ten years ago. He opened his talk, "Do You Know or Do You Think You Know? Creating a Testing Culture at State Farm," at the A2012 conference in Las Vegas with
You've all heard about the recent meningitis outbreak, right? Being a data-guy and a map-guy, I went looking for maps related to the outbreak. I found the following map on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website. It shows the states that received the recalled drug used in epidurals (for back
Sunny days, keeping the clouds away, can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?? Oops, sorry, was just day dreaming about younger days and the magic of an eight foot talking yellow bird. How great was Sesame Street? I learned counting, my abc’s, sharing, diversity,
Last week I wrote a SAS/IML program that computes the odds of winning the game of craps. I noted that the program remains valid even if the dice are not fair. For convenience, here is a SAS/IML function that computes the probability of winning at craps, given the probability vector
You might know about the many automatic macro variables that are available in SAS. They provide plenty of information about the SAS environment, such as the current user (SYSUSERID), the SAS version (SYSVER and SASVLONG), and the operating system where SAS is running (SYSCP and SYSCPL). That information is often
As SLG’s health policy specialist, I’m chartered with developing novel ways to apply data analytics to our state government health systems. If you ask me, it’s the perfect blend of technology and policy - two of my favorite things. However, I sometimes find it challenging to identify the areas within
It is easy to simulate data that is uniformly distributed in the unit cube for any dimension. However, it is less obvious how to generate data in the unit simplex. The simplex is the set of points (x1,x2,...,xd) such that Σi xi = 1 and 0 ≤ xi ≤ 1
A year ago I set out to periodically blog from my perspective of leading R&D for our advanced analytics software. I invited SAS colleagues who also work in various areas of advanced analytics to blog on their own interesting conversations with each other and with customers about the intersection of
SAS/GRAPH gives you the ability to customize your graphs (or even create totally new types of custom graphs) ... and it is my firm belief that it gives you a competitive advantage by allowing you to "make sense" of your data in ways your competitors can't. Most of the examples in
As much as I enjoy dramatic reinterpretations, for this blog post I’m just going to talk to you about the complex challenges municipal organizations face in setting spending priorities. The complexity stems from competing aspects of the various projects vying for funding. Some of these factors are related to the
Do null sets always spell bad news? @philsimon says no. Find out why.
