It seemed like an easy task. A SAS user asked me how to use the SGPLOT procedure to create a bar chart where the vertical axis shows percentages instead of counts. I assumed that there was some simple option that would change the scale of the vertical axis from counts
This week's SAS tip is from Carol Matthews and Brian Shilling's book Validating Clinical Trial Data Reporting with SAS. Written for SAS programmers, this engaging guide contains many hands-on tips--including the featured excerpt below. The following excerpt is from SAS Press authors Carol Matthews and Brian Shilling's book "Validating Clinical Trial Data Reporting with SAS"
There are two activities which, when taken in combination, have occupied the vast majority of my working hours for the past 20 years: writing computer programs and writing...well, just writing. During my college years I completed my degree with a double-major: Computer Science and English. (My English degree has a
Blogger Dylan Jones offers 3 tips for more effective data profiling.
We've been busy this year producing books for SAS users. Take a look at our Upcoming Titles list. These are just a few of the titles we have going right now. You've seen me promote specific topics throughout the year. Now is your chance to tell me where your experience
If you haven’t heard of an APCD, it’s one of those acronyms you need to know. All-Payer Claims Databases are simply databases that consist of claims data from all health care payers in a given state. This includes private payers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield, and public payers such
Frequently someone will post a question to the SAS Support Community that says something like this: I am trying to do [statistical task]and SAS issues an error and reports that my correlation matrix is not positive definite. What is going on and how can I complete [the task]? The statistical
David Sedaris, a native of Raleigh, NC, who has made it big as a humorist and author, recently posted his “Ideal Bookshelf” on Facebook. The picture was created by a company called Ideal Bookshelf, which “paints portraits of people through the spines of their favorite books: the ones that changed
Several weeks ago, South Carolina was the victim of what some experts believe to be the largest cyber-attack against a state tax department in history. Approximately 3.6 million personal South Carolina income tax returns were exposed, and nearly 657,000 businesses compromised, in an international hacking attack. Coincidentally, SAS and the SC
Hello, everyone! I’m excited to be part of this great blog and share a few of my ideas. A little about me – I’m a marketer at heart, passionate about strategy, creativity, branding and analytics. I love discovering marketing lessons by examining things around me. At SAS, I’m a marketing
As previously mentioned, I attended this year's DMA Annual Conference as a sponsor and found many ways that it was a wonderful experience as both a sponsor and an attendee. That said, there actually was one part of my DMA experience that gave me pause enough to want to share it
Organizations must find the right balance between tactical use of their data and strategic use of their data. The following statement encapsulates the difference between an application that was primarily designed from a tactical perspective versus a strategic one.: "Thanks, you delivered what I asked for (tactical), but not what I
What I love most about my job is the travel. The blind guy gets around. (We're talking a lot.) And wherever he goes, I go. Sadly, Ed thinks that people are excited because he’s shown up. WRONG! I'm the rock star on this team.
Last week I wrote about using acceptance-rejection algorithms in vector languages to simulate data. The main point I made is that in a vector language it is efficient to generate many more variates than are needed, with the knowledge that a certain proportion will be rejected. In last week's article,
Recently, top executives from SAS gathered in Washington, DC with customers and other interested parties to discuss the potential impact of "big data" and high-performance analytics on the U.S. government. Topics included cyber-attack strategies, health care, bio-surveillance, border security and of course, fraud and improper payments. On the heels of
This week's SAS tip is from Susan Slaughter and Lora Delwiche's bestselling The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.2. Susan and Lora are revered in the user community. And their work continues to help SAS users throughout the world. I hope you'll also find value in this week's excerpt. The following excerpt is from
Data governance as an MDM program planning task, part 2.
The ODS DOCUMENT and the DOCUMENT procedure give you the ability to save ODS output. Once saved, you can print that same work, as many times as you want, to any ODS destination. But what does this mean for you? With PROC DOCUMENT, you can: Make changes to the appearance
Have you heard the expression "Talk Turkey"? Well then, what better (tongue-in-cheek) thing to do around the Thanksgiving holiday, than talk some turkey using SAS Graphs! ;) I don't usually decorate my graphs with images and pictures (they typically make the graph more difficult to read), but when it comes
For some odd reason, the open-source Apache Hadoop ecosystem consists of cleverly named components that seem to have escaped from the Central Park Zoo. You may be aware that the little yellow elephant named Hadoop was actually a stuffed toy that Doug Cutting’s son owned. (Doug is the co-creator of
The LOC function is one of the most important functions in the SAS/IML language. The LOC function finds elements of a vector or matrix that satisfy some condition. For example, if you are going to apply a logarithmic transform to data, you can use the LOC function to find all
Most custom tasks need to access SAS data in some way. Since custom tasks are built using Microsoft .NET, and the .NET Framework is object-oriented, it would be convenient if we had an object-oriented method for navigating SAS data sources. That was the thinking behind the "SasData"-namespace classes within the
We all know the holiday shopping season is paramount to a retailer’s annual results. As we enter the 2012 holiday shopping season, customers’ expectations of retailers have never been higher. One thing that can plague retailers, especially during the hectic holiday season, is out-of-stocks. Whether you are a fashion retailer
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
The number one rule about product launch blogging is to never blog about your product launch. Take that, Fight Club! And yet, most marketers are expected to write multiple blog posts in conjunction with a launch. How do the smart marketers do it? They talk about the issues and share their
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
My colleague Allison Lane posed this question in a blog post earlier today: What gives you a sense of awe at SAS? I hesitated to post an answer. I mean, who cares what somebody in public relations says? As an 18-year PR veteran here, I’m not exactly objective. But here’s
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
What gives you a sense of awe? Perhaps the birth of a child. A sunset. A space shuttle flight. Or maybe your colleagues. Your workplace. Your company’s leadership. Here at SAS, I am in awe every day. SAS is programmers and statisticians, yes. It’s also landscapers, painters, builders, marketers, chefs,
