Uncontrolled product proliferation can have bad consequences, and these are well recognized. There is certainly extra cost and complexity in managing more SKUs (rather than fewer SKUs). And it is unlikely that each new offering adds entirely incremental volume. Instead, the increased product overlap just leads to increased self-cannibalization. We
Fire department operations are very complex, with multi-faceted missions that include not only fire prevention and suppression, but emergency response and fire inspections. These must be coordinated with area growth and development decisions, and water system management decisions. When a fire or an emergency occurs, the right equipment, with the right people,
When working with "big data" you usually have too many points to view in a plot, and end up subsetting or summarizing the data. But now, in SAS 9.3, you have an alternative! For example, the following scatter plot of 10,000+ points is just a visual "blob": But using a new
Last week I wrote an article in which I pointed out that many SAS programmers write a simulation in SAS by writing a macro loop. This approach is extremely inefficient, so I presented a more efficient technique. Not only is the macro loop approach slow, but there are other undesirable
US Presidential Race Going to the Dogs Mitt Romney transporting his dog on the roof rack. Barack Obama eating dog meat as a child in Indonesia. Former candidate Rick Santorum overwrought about man-dog love. Is this what the US Presidential race has turned into -- one dog attack after another? Back in
With the London 2012 Olympics around the corner, there are sure to be reports or rumors of performance-enhancing drug use among some athletes. It turns out that using manufactured chemicals to give yourself an edge is frowned upon in the athletic community. However, as a SAS user you should avail
If you've heard anything from SAS in recent months, then you've heard about high-performance analytics and the new SAS Visual Analytics offering. SAS has taken the high-performance analytics message around the world in a series of recent "road shows". From the start, this project has enjoyed a different development process
We've introduced the topic of the Four E's and discussed the role of analytics in Enforcement and Engineering. Now let's delve into Emergency Response. A quick emergency response can make all the difference in saving the lives of crash victims. Many vehicles can now communicate directly with emergency responders immediately after
Over the past few years, and especially since I posted my article on eight tips to make your simulation run faster, I have received many emails (often with attached SAS programs) from SAS users who ask for advice about how to speed up their simulation code. For this reason, I
A SAS Professionals attendee and Twitter follower named Marco asks for help: ..struggling to find a method with custom tasks in EG to be able to list the datasets in a library, can you help please? Sure, no problem. This is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. First, make sure that you have a reference
I have blogged about three different SAS/IML techniques that iterate over categories and process the observations in each category. The three techniques are as follows: Use a WHERE clause on the READ statement to read only the observations in the ith category. This is described in the article "BY-group processing
Free The BFD The BFD has been on a short hiatus, fending off potential litigation with the organizing committee of a quadrennial international sporting event that isn't the World Cup. Per the advice of SAS Legal, I've had to make a few changes to the May 30 post, now entitled "Forecasting
I was recently following a post where a user asked what the earliest SAS PROCs (procedures) were. Since I started using SAS in 1970, I knew I could find a copy of the old documentation that we used at that time. This “user’s guide” was something that you printed out on
Most management literature and studies posit that organizations with a clear mission and work objectives, understood by all levels of the organization, are the most productive. The key to that success is effectively communicating the mission, agreeing on key performance indicators and giving employees at all levels access to relevant
When you are working with probability distributions (normal, Poisson, exponential, and so forth), there are four essential functions that a statistical programmer needs. As I've written before, for common univariate distributions, SAS provides the following functions: the PDF function, which returns the probability density at a given point the CDF
"Welcome to the English summer." "In the US you have climate. In England we have Weather." These are just two of the familiar phrases I heard yesterday during the SAS Professionals Convention held at SAS UK in Marlow. The weather changed from sun to dark clouds to rain and even
In Paul Allison’s own words, “It’s about time!” The first edition of his book on logistic regression came out in 1999, and since then, “there have been an enormous number of changes and enhancements to the SAS procedures for doing logistic regression and related methods.” Allison has incorporated those changes
Suppose that you have two data vectors, x and y, with the same number of elements. How can you rearrange the values of y so that they have the same relative order as the values of x? In other words, find a permutation, π, of the elements of y so
Update 24Nov2015: The methods in this post no longer work for Twitter, as Twitter has discontinued support for its "share count" API that was used within the Twitter share buttons. But the Facebook method still works, and I've described a method for counting LinkedIn shares on another post. As of
If you're using JMP, please read on. This week's tip is from Professor Robert Carver and his popular book Practical Data Analysis with JMP. To read a free chapter and reviews of the book, visit Robert's author page. The following excerpt is from SAS Press author Robert Carver and his book "Practical Data Analysis with JMP" Copyright ©
I've been working on a new book about Simulating Data with SAS. In researching the chapter on simulation of multivariate data, I've noticed that the probability density function (PDF) of multivariate distributions is often specified in a matrix form. Consequently, the multivariate density can usually be computed by using the
When I need to graph a function of two variables, I often choose to use a contour plot. A surface plot is probably easier for many people to understand, but it has several disadvantages when compared to a contour plot. For example, the following statements in SAS/IML Studio displays a
I received the following query regarding the RAND function in Base SAS: In SAS, is specifying 0 as a random number seed the same as not specifying a seed at all? The question concerns initializing the SAS random number stream by using the internal system clock. You can do this
We've all heard of her. A little blond girl with a penchant for trespassing, and very finicky preferences in mattresses and breakfast food. Unfortunately, Goldilocks isn't just part of a fairy tale, she is alive, well, and causing havoc throughout government. If you haven't made the connection yet, "bear" with
In 2011-2012, North Carolina became one of many states to restructure their educator evaluation system to incorporate student growth. The NC Department of Public Instruction commissioned the external expertise of WestEd to evaluate various growth models and recommend value-added technology that would help them best meet their mission of using meaningful evaluation to
I often use the SAS/IML language for simulating data with certain known properties. In fact, I'm writing a book called Simulating Data with SAS. When I simulate repeated measurements (sometimes called replicated data), I often want to generate an ID variable that identifies which measurement is associated with which subject
We just published Gerhard Svolba’s Data Quality for Analytics Using SAS. When I first heard about it, I thought we’d have a tome covering such topics as standardizing data, cleaning it up, removing duplicates, and so on. However, as Gerhard says in his Introduction, “There are many aspects of data
The Swiss army knife is known for its versatility, with a variety of tools and blades to help you complete the task at hand. When you are creating graphics, you sometimes have a special feature you want to add, but you can't seem to find the right syntax "tool" to
No matter what statistical programming language you use, be careful of testing for an exact value of a floating-point number. This is known in the world of numerical analysis as "10.0 times 0.1 is hardly ever 1.0" (Kernighan and Plauger, 1974, The Elements of Programming Style). There are many examples
A reader wrote for help with a computational problem. He has a vector of length N and the vector contains integer values in the range [1, 120], which represent months for which events occurred over a 10-year period. The question is: what is the 24-month period for which the most
