As the holidays approach, we’ll all have some down-time to catch up on personal and professional reading, hopefully cozied up by a fire with a cup of hot chocolate in hand. While most books regarding data-driven decision making and value-added analyses can be pretty heavy, I’d like to suggest two
Analytics maturity is a hot topic right now. Many come to SAS for answers on how to assess their analytics maturity and advance their use of analytics, especially at a corporate level. I want to share the highlights of what we usually prescribe from a best practices perspective regarding advancing
I recently had a student in a SAS Enterprise Guide class declare that EG was the next best thing since sliced bread. I couldn't have agreed with her more! In this post, I‘ll share four ways where EG outperforms SAS code –yes I know you’re a codeaholic dear reader, but these reasons
A few days ago on the SAS/IML Support Community, there was an interesting discussion about how to simulate data from a truncated Poisson distribution. The SAS/IML user wanted to generate values from a Poisson distribution, but discard any zeros that are generated. This kind of simulation is known as an
SAS Publishing has been offering eBooks through partners like Amazon, Apple, and Google, for a number of years. Our content is also available through subscription-based companies like Books 24x7, Safari, and EBSCO. We have learned that taking content developed for hardcopy and turning it into an ebook is not a
Does data governance make a difference? See what @davidloshin has to say.
How do you hire a Chief Data Scientist? That's not a hypothetical question: I know of at least three companies that are actively looking for a "Chief Data Scientist" at the moment. Hiring the right person is harder than you'd think. Whether or not a Chief Data Scientist is a
I was recently asked, "Does SAS support computing inverse hyperbolic trigonometric functions?" I was pretty sure that I had used the inverse hyperbolic trig functions in SAS, so I was surprised when I read the next sentence: "I ask because I saw a Usage Note that says these functions are
We are careening towards the holiday season, and this year more than ever before it's going to mean one thing: Online Shopping. As you enter your credit card number over and over to complete your many purchases, you might occasionally transpose or mistype your account number. Does it surprise you
Hot off the press and debuting at NESUG is Michael Tuchman's new book, PROC DOCUMENT by Example Using SAS. Tuchman's book demonstrates the practical uses of the DOCUMENT procedure, a part of the Output Delivery System, in SAS 9.3. The DOCUMENT procedure allows general SAS users to store and manage
Two enduring principles of forecasting are that simple methods can work as well as fancy methods, and that combining (averaging) forecasts, also known as "ensemble forecasting," will usually result in more accurate predictions than the individual methods being averaged. We saw a good demonstration of these principles in Tuesday's election
This week's SAS tip is from Barry de Ville and his book Decision Trees for Business Intelligence and Data Mining: Using SAS Enterprise Miner. Barry is a technical and analytical consultant at SAS. To learn more about Barry and his forthcoming new edition of the book, following this week's excerpt, visit his author
I’ve just returned from my third regional conference this year…SCSUG in Houston. We had great attendance; 207 folks registered for the event! And several of our authors were there: Kirk Lafler, Sanjay Matange and Cynthia Zender. SAS’ very own Paul Kent gave the keynote address on big data and high
The other day I was constructing covariance matrices for simulating data for a mixed model with repeated measurements. I was using the SAS/IML BLOCK function to build up the "R-side" covariance matrix from smaller blocks. The matrix I was constructing was block-diagonal and looked like this: The matrix represents a
Disasters like Hurricane Sandy, by and large, shine a positive light on humanity, with the heroic actions of first responders and volunteers, and the massive outpouring of support from across the nation. They also present fraud opportunities for the shady operators and criminals among us. Hurricanes leave behind a lot
The 2012 US Presidential race comes to a close today (thankfully), and there is no shortage of wacky indicators predicting the winner: Iowa Electronic Markets FiveThirtyEight PollyVote University of Colorado In primitive times a diviner could foretell the future by poisoning a chicken -- whether it lived or died provided
Read David Loshin's latest blog post: "Innovation in Creating Information Products."
In the U.S. we have a presidential election every 4 years - and as luck would have it, 2012 is an election year! I see a lot of election maps & graphs in the news, and I'm always subconsciously critiquing them in my mind and thinking to myself, "How would I graph this
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of Foresight The importance of trust in the dissemination of forecasts through an organization cannot be overstated. Lack of trust, due in no small measure to the biases arising from “silo mentalities” and misplaced incentives, can and too often does undermine the forecasting process. Foresight has
Each spring and fall, I start clearing out the kid's small clothes, old toys, etc. It can sometimes go too far and reach into my "digital pack-rat" issues. (Wait, what does that mean? Well, just ask the person who last week requested detail on a project I worked 3 years
I recently encountered a SUGI30 paper by Chuck Kincaid entitled "Guidelines for Selecting the Covariance Structure in Mixed Model Analysis." I think Kincaid does a good job of describing some common covariance structures that are used in mixed models. One of the many uses for SAS/IML is as a language
We all have some sort of intuitive idea of what time series data is – it’s a bunch of measurements or observations that are marked by a time stamp – we know when the measurement was taken, as well as what was measured. This natural temporal ordering of the data
This week's SAS tip is from Ron Cody and his book Cody's Data Cleaning Techniques Using SAS, Second Edition. Ron is the popular author of several bestselling SAS books and has been a SAS user since 1977. Visit Ron's author page for lots of bonus content, including a free chapter from his
K-12 education reform and policy has seen a recent surge in the cinema with "Waiting for Superman," "The Lottery," and this fall’s "Won't Back Down.” However, if you can’t bring yourself to spend $9.00+ at the box office, or (like me) have a hard time finding babysitters to even get
The determinant of a matrix arises in many statistical computations, such as in estimating parameters that fit a distribution to multivariate data. For example, if you are using a log-likelihood function to fit a multivariate normal distribution, the formula for the log-likelihood involves the expression log(det(Σ)), where Σ is the
I work on a variety of projects at SAS, most of which require some level of team collaboration in source management systems. Due to the many technologies that we work with, SAS developers use different source management tools for different purposes. I've got projects in CVS, Subversion, and Git. When
“Frankenstorm” is what the U.S. National Weather Service is calling the combination of Hurricane Sandy, an early winter storm heading east, and a blast of arctic air from the North. SAS headquarters is located in the middle of the U.S. east coast ... and we barely missed being the bulls-eye for this
You’ve known it, you’ve loved it. Your copy’s pages are worn, torn, or coffee-stained, and yet it’s still as beloved as ever. It’s your Little SAS Book. It belongs on every SAS programmer’s bookshelf, and it’s now even better. Susan Slaughter and Lora Delwiche have worked to help you improve
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
