If you're using SAS Enterprise Guide and you're not using any custom tasks, then you're missing out. Custom tasks -- plug-in extensions for SAS Enterprise Guide -- have been around for years, and a few ambitious programmers have managed to build them without the benefit of much guidance or documentation.
The Institute of Business Forecasting has named Larry Lapide, Research Affiliate at MIT, as recipient of its "Lifetime Achievement in Business Forecasting & Planning" award -- a much deserved honor! Larry has written a quarterly column for Journal of Business Forecasting for 15 years, and I've been a longtime follower.
Sometimes a categorical variable has many levels, but you are only interested in displaying the levels that occur most frequently. For example, if you are interested in the number of times that a song was purchased on iTunes during the past week, you probably don't want a bar chart with
According to a recent article from Forbes, the three hottest trends in retail for 2013 are: Mobile -- 93 percent of mobile developers anticipate that it is “likely to very likely” that most retail companies will have enabled mobile commerce in 2013, and 2/3 of developers believe that consumers will
Dateline: October 4, 2012 – Facebook reaches one billion users! One billion people connected on a single platform; one-seventh of the world’s population. If you assume 40,000 BCE as the start of modern humans, it took the planet 41,804 years to reach a population level of one billion; it took
David Loshin's latest blog post: "Balancing Performance Measures for Data Accessibility using Data Federation."
I've bragged about how easy it is to install custom tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide. It's simple: you copy the .NET assembly (usually a single DLL file) into one of the designated folders in your SAS Enterprise Guide installation, and your task just shows up in the menu. Since I
The creation of Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) took off in 2009 with the establishment of the State Health Information Exchange Cooperative Agreement Program (SHIECAP). Recently, it seems like HIEs have been somewhat of the middle-child, garnering less attention between the health insurance exchanges and Medicaid expansion. But let’s take a
I am pleased to announce that this year at SAS Global Forum 2013 (San Francisco, April 27 to May 1, 2013) I am giving a free hands-on workshop (HOW) entitled "Getting Started with the SAS/IML Language." If you are not familiar with the very popular Hands-On Workshop series at SAS
OK, I promise this is the last article on Forest Plots (at least for a while). In the previous article on Subgrouped Forest Plot with Font Attributes, I discussed how to use bold text for subgroup headings. I mentioned that increasing the font size would not work as it would
Just a few days ago our "super-duper tech support trooper" called in asking for the link to the subgrouped Forest Plot with bold headings. She was referring to this Forest Plot with Subgroups I had posted earlier. However, as you can see, while the subgroup values are indented from the subgroup headers, the headers
The Economist Intelligence Unit recently published a report that highlights some C-suite dynamics that remind me of that childrens' game "monkey in the middle." The report details multiple ways in which surveyed CMOs believe one thing about the role of marketing in the company, and then their other functional peers (CIO,
Many of my blogging colleagues are taking this week to reflect on their top posts in 2012. Some are using the visitor statistics to rank the posts, but as Andy Ratcliffe points out, that gives short-shrift to the late-season articles. This year, I'm going to use this space to recap
This first SAS tip of 2013 comes from the illustrious Ron Cody and his bestselling book Learning SAS by Example: A Programmer's Guide. I hope you'll find this excerpt helpful- as well as all of our future weekly tips on this blog. Here's to a great year! The following excerpt is from SAS Press
In the spirit of the new year – the International Year of Statistics – I thought I’d share some different ways to use statistics. Can statistics help you in your everyday life? Certainly! And here's an example to prove it... Let's say you have a dresser drawer full of white socks.
It's midyear, and management has decided that a new publication is a great way to highlight the work of a group of people within the organization to external audiences. "We'll keep costs down by doing the design and layout ourselves. We just need to buy the software licenses." Money is
It's the start of a new year. Have you made a resolution to be a better data analyst? A better SAS statistical programmer? To learn more about multivariate statistics? What better way to start the New Year than to read (or re-read!) the top 12 articles for statistical programmers from
As we turn the calendar to a new year, we tend to take a look at our lives and make some goals for improvement. Maybe it involves fitting in our favorite pair of jeans again or finally starting the next great American novel. Change and improvement are second nature in
Look at what arrived in the mail room this morning! Of course, I was expecting it sometime in January...but not first thing! Here's to early deliveries...perhaps this will set the tone for all of my projects in the new year.
In part 1 of my thoughts about analytics maturity, I deferred talking about issues related to the actual assessment of your organization’s level. Today I intend to detail some of the ways my peers and I are thinking about analytical maturity, comment on scales in use today, and address some
We decided to take a look back at our blogs in 2012 and see what piqued the interest of our readers. We had a little bit of everything from tricks to advice on all things SAS. Here’s the list of the Top 10 Blogs from 2012. Enjoy reading them again
A colossal man-made storm known as “the fiscal cliff” looms on the horizon of the United States economy. Much attention has been paid to the political wrangling behind this situation in Washington, while Congress seems oblivious to unanimity among economists that large-scale abrupt austerity measures like this “fiscal cliff” generate more harm
Marketers all focus on what we think our customers will like. We analyze mountains of data, look at what our competition is doing, ask our staff for ideas, look at past year's marketing campaigns, look at our facilties/products, hire outside consultants......and the list goes on and on. But with all this analysis going on, one
It goes without saying that if you know the value of analytics, it can sometimes be frustrating when leaders who may not have an analytic background do not understand or see the difference between basic reporting and advanced analytics. At SAS, we often refer to those two very different things
With their mass SAS appeal, these twelve books packed a powerful punch in 2012. From SAS and JMP basics to more advanced applications, to SAS certification, to business intelligence - these titles cover a range of users' interests. Did you use any of these titles this year? Do you have any predictions for popular book topics
The Lancaster Centre for Forecasting is led by two of my favorites in the forecasting world, Robert Fildes and Sven Crone. The Centre is home to cutting edge research and consulting, covering the range of forecasting models and methods, as well as real-world forecasting process. The Centre has announced a
‘Tis the season to be gifting! So what could be better than gifting your fellow SAS user or yourself with three gifts to celebrate the holiday season? As 2012 comes to an end, we think it’s a great idea to be thinking of ringing in the New Year with dynamic
Are you ready for the upcoming International Year of Statistics? I have prepared myself by doing a correspondence analysis. Excusez-moi? Correspondence analysis is a technique that has been very popular in France and is therefore sometimes referred to as French Statistics. Correspondence analysis is a technique for categorical data analysis.
I used "Dropbox" in the title for this post, but these techniques can be used for other cloud-based file sharing services, such as GitHub and Google Drive. Using PROC HTTP (added in SAS 9.2), you can easily access any "cloud-based" file as long as you have a public link to
Watching our nation approach the "fiscal cliff", and the dire predictions if we truly drive off it like the last scene in Thelma and Louise, has sharpened my view of the potential risks that huge gaps of fraud and abuse present to all of us. One of the key lessons
