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.
Gambling games that use dice, such as the game of "craps," are often used to demonstrate the laws of probability. For two dice, the possible rolls and probability of each roll are usually represented by a matrix. Consequently, the SAS/IML language makes it easy to compute the probabilities of various
Pam Stroud of the International Institute of Forecasters has just announced an extension of the deadline for SAS/IIF forecasting research grant proposals to October 26, 2012. More details on the IIF website.
Milestone achieved: I've completed the final chapter of Creating Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide using Microsoft .NET and turned it over to SAS Press for editing and production. It's scheduled to be available in early 2013. I committed to writing this book nearly 5 years ago. I'll engage in
John D. Cook posted a story about Hardy, Ramanujan, and Euler and discusses a conjecture in number theory from 1937. Cook says, Euler discovered 635,318,657 = 158^4 + 59^4 = 134^4 + 133^4 and that this was the smallest [integer]known to be the sum of two fourth powers in two
Did you know that you can index into SAS/IML matrices by using unique strings that you assign via the MATTRIB statement? The MATTRIB statement associates various attributes to a matrix. Usually, these attributes are only used for printing, but you can also use the ROWNAME= and COLNAME= attributes to subset
Ron Cody’s at it again. It’s like he just can’t help himself; he knows SAS and wants to help others know it too. His new book, Cody's Collection of Popular SAS Programming Tasks and How to Tackle Them gathers often-used programming tasks and techniques in one handy volume, allowing users
Business forecasting is a dismal field of endeavor, fit for dismal people like myself. In an attempt to make this field interesting to people who aren't so dismal by nature, our friends at PollyVote Election Forecasting ask the question: Could you be President of the United States? The PollyVote project is
By now, most of you probably already know how to add drill downs and hover text to your SAS graphs. But did you know you can add pop-up images and graphs? Here are a couple of examples ... In this first example, when you hover your mouse over each state, you
Is there a forecasting problem you'd like to attack, and wouldn't mind a little financial support to do it? If so, the SAS/IIF Grant to Support Research on Forecasting may be just what you need to get started. For the tenth year, in collaboration with the International Institute of Forecasters,
I was recently flipping through Ross' Simulation (2006, 4th Edition) and saw the following exercise: Let N be the minimum number of draws from a uniform distribution [until the sum of the variates]exceeds 1. What is the expected value of N? Write a simulation to estimate the expected value. For
This summer’s education conferences have been dominated by sessions discussing the “next generation,” Common Core aligned assessments in English and mathematics. As 44 states plan for the transition from their state tests to the new PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium assessments, SAS has received repeated questions from our partners
The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book: Creating Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide using Microsoft .NET. If your custom task generates a SAS program, the chances are pretty high that your program will reference one or more variables within a SAS data set. Despite our best efforts,
Sometimes it is useful to group observations based on the values of some variable. Common schemes for grouping include binning and using quantiles. In the binning approach, a variable is divided into k equal intervals, called bins, and each observation is assigned to a bin. In this scheme, the size
Dylan Jones (@dataqualitypro) explains why data migration should be a keystone of your data transformation.
Detecting and preventing fraud isn't easy. Many tools and techniques are required, and while the digital age and advanced technologies have made fraud much easier in many ways, those same technologies have opened up new ways to combat it. One of those comes in the form of social network analysis,
Dear Miss SAS Answers, I have read through a few Dear Miss SAS Answers blog posts, but I cannot seem to find what I am looking for. I need to extract only the second duplicate from a whole list of duplicates per account number. Is there a way to
With the US presidential election looming, all eyes are on the Electoral College. In the presidential election, each state gets as many votes in the Electoral College as it has representatives in both congressional houses. (The District of Columbia also gets three electors.) Because every state has two senators, it
Last week I attended a meeting of the Toronto Area SAS Society. (Okay, I didn't just attend; I was a presenter as well.) This user group meeting contained a feature that I had never seen before: "Solutions to the Posed Problem". Weeks before the meeting, an "open problem" was posted
Who says anyone is an expert at something? I definitely do not when it comes to SAS (well, anything for that matter). Each time I sit through a presentation at a conference I learn something new. During the SAS Western Users Conference, fondly know as WUSS, this month I learned
Ron Cody’s newest book, Cody's Collection of Popular SAS Programming Tasks and How to Tackle Them, is already getting high marks from early reviewers. Gerry Hobbs (West Virginia University), says, “This is an excellent book that deserves a place on every SAS professional’s bookcase.” Long-time SAS user Andrew T. Kuligowski
If you use a word three times, it's yours. -Unknown When I was a child, my mother used to encourage me to increase my vocabulary by saying, "If you use a word three times, it's yours for life." I believe that the same saying holds for programming techniques: Use a
A week ago, SAS "wusses" got together in Long Beach, California for another successful WUSS conference. Personally, I really enjoy all SAS user conferences as it gives me an opportunity to see the creative ways in which SAS users are exploiting our software. One such case was the paper "Power
Manfred Kiefer is a Globalization Specialist for SAS and the author of SAS Encoding: Understanding the Details. This week's tip is from his new book. In a review, Edwin Hart said "This book provides a very readable description of a topic that has long needed exposure: Why do my characters get
Government pensions at the state and local government level have come under attack in recent years over their viability. Much of this attack has been political and is being used to go after unions and pensioners who tend to support one party or another. State and local governments work hard to maintain viable
