Last week I wrote a SAS/IML program that computes the odds of winning the game of craps. I noted that the program remains valid even if the dice are not fair. For convenience, here is a SAS/IML function that computes the probability of winning at craps, given the probability vector
Books are anything but boring in Las Vegas. Just ask Stacey Hamilton and Lisanne Roskam, who’ve spent the past two days in the SAS bookstore at Analytics 2012. Despite their hectic pace, I managed to track down a few conference highlights from Stacey (a developmental editor for SAS Press—and a runner) this
In my recent work for updates and changes to the SAS 9.4 OLAP Server documentation, I documented a new OLAP Server procedure that can be extremely useful to our customers. The function has been available for internal use but will become available to customers in SAS 9.4. The OLAPCONTENTS procedure
You might know about the many automatic macro variables that are available in SAS. They provide plenty of information about the SAS environment, such as the current user (SYSUSERID), the SAS version (SYSVER and SASVLONG), and the operating system where SAS is running (SYSCP and SYSCPL). That information is often
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
Don't give up on the dating game. Just because there is no prompt type specifically for dates, it can still be accomplished with some stored process matchmaking. BI Dashboard offers a dynamic prompt indicator which provides the ultimate flexibility in developing prompt based reports and dashboards. The dynamic prompt indicator
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
This weekend, lots of SAS authors are going to Las Vegas. The draw is the Analytics 2012 conference. There, several of our authors will lead discussions, including keynote speaker Tim Rey (coauthor of the new SAS Press book Applied Data Mining for Forecasting Using SAS) and Gerhard Svolba (author of
Right now, grid computing is one of the hottest topics here at SAS. To get more information about the technology and how people can get trained in it, I talked to Nancy Goodyear who manages e-Learning products at SAS. What is grid computing? Grid computing is a type of computing
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
Forget the New York Times bestseller list. We’ve created our own lists for book-bound SAS and JMP users. Besides featuring the top 5 bestselling SAS books at September conferences (WUSS, JMP Discovery, and MWSUG), we’ve provided greater insight by including comments from some observant Publications representatives. WUSS 2012 Carpenter's Guide to
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
Remember my blog post last month “Help us innovate”? I asked for your ideas on ways we could improve our products and services. Thanks to those of you who sent in ideas. We combined your thoughts with those of our own Publications division staff, vetted the ideas, and then held
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
"I want everything!" said a student when I paused to ask my SAS Programming 1 class what else they wanted to learn. Seriously! You want me to share everything I know in three days? The student came back with... "Well okay, what about those freebies you mentioned?" That’s how it all
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
This week's SAS tip is from Sandra Schlotzhauer and her book Elementary Statistics Using SAS. Besides being a long-time SAS user, Sandra has extensive experience teaching basic statistics to non-statisticians. Her accessible style resonates with SAS users, including these reviewers of the book. The following excerpt is from SAS Press author Sandra Schlotzhauer and her
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
I am now back from MWSUG, where I gave the opening session keynote. I was a first-timer at MWSUG, and I would like to congratulate Rex Pruitt and Donalee Wanna for co-chairing a great conference. My keynote went well, but I no longer have a 100% success rate on everyone
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,
