Our newest book in the Wiley and SAS Business Series, Statistical Thinking: Improving Business Performance, Second Edition, has been called “probably the most practical basic statistics textbook that has ever been written within a business context.”* It prepares readers for business leadership by developing their capacity to apply statistical thinking to
SAS Global Forum 2012 at Orlando, Florida is just round the corner and we are excited to see so many presentations offered by users on SG procedures and GTL. We'll add a few more on new SAS 9.3 features of SG procedures and GTL. These include cluster groups for discrete and interval axes, cluster
For me, this will be a SAS Global Forum of many "firsts". My first Closing Session. My first time attending as a staffer outside of SAS R&D (well, except for the chilly SUGI 21 in Chicago). And my first chance to host the SAS Tech Talk sessions, which will be
SAS software provides many run-time functions that you can call from your SAS/IML or DATA step programs. The SAS/IML language has several hundred built-in statistical functions, and Base SAS software contains hundreds more. However, it is common for statistical programmers to extend the run-time library to include special user-defined functions.
Have you ever selected File->Schedule Project or Schedule->Process Flow in SAS Enterprise Guide? Are you curious about what magic these actions will trigger? Here's what happens: SAS Enterprise Guide creates a VBScript program that contains the instructions to start SAS Enterprise Guide, load your project, run your project or flow,
PROC STP is a new procedure for SAS 9.3 Stored Processes. It's so new and different that I have not had the opportunity to use it yet in a customer engagement. When writing about it for the now released "The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes" book, I had
Because the SAS/IML language is a general purpose programming language, it doesn't have a BY statement like most other SAS procedures (such as PROC REG). However, there are several ways to loop over categorical variables and perform an analysis on the observations in each category. One way is to use
ODS Graphics have matured. With SAS 9.2, GTL and SG procedures were a new direction for creating analytical graphs in SAS. The motivation and design of the GTL framework and the SG procedures was driven primarily by the needs of the procedure writers within SAS to enable the automatic creation
I’m a SAS user in the Pharmaceutical industry. I switched to the Pharmaceutical industry (from Marketing Research) four years ago and had a lot to learn! I started my new endeavor by purchasing some excellent SAS books, joining my local SAS user group, attending conferences (Michigan SAS User Group, PharmaSUG,
In about 30 lines of PowerShell script, we can build a SAS data set viewer that: Does not require SAS on the PC Provides very basic filtering capability Also allows for easy export to CSV All you need is the ability to run PowerShell scripts, and the SAS Local Data
Are you a prefectionist when it comes to forecasting, or any kind of data analysis? If so, perhaps my SAS colleague Gary Cokins can cure you. Gary is a prolific writer and contributor in the performance management field, and describes himself as a "ready-fire-aim" kind of guy. By this he means
Last week I discussed how to fit a Poisson distribution to data. The technique, which involves using the GENMOD procedure, produces a table of some goodness-of-fit statistics, but I find it useful to also produce a graph that indicates the goodness of fit. For continuous distributions, the quantile-quantile (Q-Q) plot
I'm sorry to say that there will be no "Dummies around Me" smart phone app for SAS Global Forum this year. That means that if you want to catch up with me, you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way: plan to be in the same place that I am,
Being a Hollywood celebrity means plenty of perks in addition to willing groupies. For example, the 2012 Oscars Nominee Gift Bag (valued at over $62,000) included a 5-day elephant safari in Botswana ($15,580), Eminence organic body scrub (with virgin coconut oil and raw sugar cane, $48), Naughty Bits Brownies ($50), and a
Last week I blogged about how to construct a smoother for a time series for the temperature in Albany, NY from 1995 to March, 2012. I smoothed the data by "folding" the time series into a single "year" that contains repeated measurements for each day of the year. Experts in
The birthday matching problem is a classic problem in probability theory. The part of it that people tend to remember is that in a room of 23 people, there is greater than 50% chance that two people in the room share a birthday. But the birthday matching problem is also
The first line of this week's SAS tip grabs your attention, "PROC SQL provides a helpful (though potentially dangerous) tool in the form of the DESCRIBE TABLE statement." SAS author, consultant, and member of the SAS-L Hall of Fame Howard Schreier included this intriguing statement in his book PROC SQL by Example: Using
The INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research kicks off April 15 in Huntington Beach, CA. I had a chance to preview a presentation by Glenn Bailey, Sr. Director of Operations Research at Manheim (the $3B wholesaler auto auctioneer). Glenn's talk is on "The Need for Speed: Responsive Predictive Analytics,"
In yesterday's post, I discussed a "quick and dirty" method to smooth periodic data. However, after I smoothed the data I remarked that the smoother itself was not exactly periodic. At the end points of the periodic interval, the smoother did not have equal slopes and the method does not
Over at the SAS and R blog, Ken Kleinman discussed using polar coordinates to plot time series data for multiple years. The time series plot was reproduced in SAS by my colleague Robert Allison. The idea of plotting periodic data on a circle is not new. In fact it goes
Over at the SAS Discussion Forums, someone asked how to use SAS to fit a Poisson distribution to data. The questioner asked how to fit the distribution but also how to overlay the fitted density on the data and to create a quantile-quantile (Q-Q) plot. The questioner mentioned that the
In September 2010, I questioned whether you should care about native 64-bit client applications (or the lack thereof). At the time, SAS did not have a 64-bit version of SAS Enterprise Guide or SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. A skeptical reader might assume that I was just trying to make
Locating missing values is important in statistical data analysis. I've previously written about how to count the number of missing values for each variable in a data set. In Base SAS, I showed how to use the MEANS or FREQ procedures to count missing values. In the SAS/IML language, I
Today, SAS announces a new addition to its global certification program: you can now become "SAS Versions"-certified. Over the past 36 years, SAS has delivered hundreds of software products to the business analytics marketplace. Each of those products has a version number. As new revisions are released, the combination of
A 23-year Harvard and Columbia University study was recently published shedding new light on the long-term impacts of teachers with both high and low value-added estimates. Researchers Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff tracked math and reading assessment data on over 2.5 million students from 1989-2009. They then incorporated 90% of these
Let's end 2012-Q1 with a graphic editorial comment: Forecast Accuracy vs. Effort Using a naïve model will achieve a certain level of forecast accuracy. That accuracy may be high if the demand is smooth and stable, or low if the demand is erratic. But you achieve this level of accuracy with virtually no
In a previous post I showed how to implement Stewart's (1980) algorithm for generating random orthogonal matrices in SAS/IML software. By using the algorithm, it is easy to generate a random matrix that contains a specified set of eigenvalues. If D = diag(λ1, ..., λp) is a diagonal matrix and
The March 28 edition of APICS extra features an article by Fred Tolbert on "The Seven Deadly Sins of Sales Forecasting." Although I have some objection to his Deadly Sin #1: Using Shipment History (and will discuss the objection in a forthcoming guest-post on the Institute of Business Forecasting blog),
Even Rod Serling recognized that sometimes we can't forecast worth a darn. "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" is an episode from Season 2 of the television series, The Twilight Zone, and first aired in 1961. It involves four train robbers who steal a million dollars worth of gold bars, hide
Because I am writing a new book about simulating data in SAS, I have been doing a lot of reading and research about how to simulate various quantities. Random integers? Check! Random univariate samples? Check! Random multivariate samples? Check! Recently I've been researching how to generate random matrices. I've blogged
