To a statistician, the LAG function (which was introduced in SAS/IML 9.22) is useful for time series analysis. To a numerical analyst and a statistical programmer, the function provides a convenient way to compute quantitites that involve adjacent values in any vector. The LAG function is essentially a "shift operator."
Question: What do John Travolta, Gina Davis, and I all have in common? (I mean, besides the obvious fact that we are all awesome dancers.) Answer: We have all had makeup applied by artist Roxie Stice. I was the host for two SAS Tech Talks, which were broadcast via Livestream
Last week's INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research drew over 700 attendees to Huntington Beach, CA. I had the pleasure of serving on the conference selection committee, and wanted to share this content from one of our invited speakers, Kean Chew of HAVI Global Solutions. The Numbers Behind Burgers
Like Vince said a few days ago, you don’t have to be Goliath to see how the intersection of big data and high performance analytics creates competitive advantage. Let’s also be realistic though: compared to someone like Walmart, pretty much everyone’s David! While Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank may not be the largest companies by global measures, they’re still
Bill Franks’s new book, Taming the Big Data Tidal Wave: Finding Opportunities in Huge Data Streams with Advanced Analytics, has just released. This book shows how big data is changing the world of analytics; what people, processes, technologies, and mindsets are necessary to succeed in analytics in this new era;
How can you go home on time? Take a quick tour with these 5 tips that I was able to summarize for my students in the SAS SQL 1: Essentials class yesterday. Since they found it handy and asked if it could become a blog post, I thought I’d share
The April 2012 issue of ORMS Today contains a piece on "How analytics enhance the guest experience at Walt Disney World," by Pete Buczkowski and Hai Chu. While many of us are used to forecasting just one or two things (such as unit sales or revenue), Pete and Hai illustrate
This past Monday, Tricia and I released our 2nd book this year. "The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes" provides a step-by-step approach to transitioning from SAS code into user driven (prompted) stored processes. Trimming down all the things you can do with SAS Stored Processes is next to
I blog about a lot of topics, but the following five categories represent some of my favorite subjects. Judging by the number of readers and comments, these articles have struck a chord with SAS users. If you haven't read them, check them out. (If you HAVE read them, some are
The leading cause of death for Americans between 5 and 34 isn’t what most would expect. It’s not disease or acute illness. It’s traffic crashes. The good news is that the number of highway deaths has steadily decreased the last few years, yet crashes still cause more than 30,000 fatalities and
When I first joined SAS in 1993, we were gliding into the golden age of 32-bit computing on the PC. Microsoft offered a new extension to Microsoft Windows 3.1 called Win32s, and it allowed 32-bit applications to run on the Windows operating system. SAS Version 6.10 for Windows was one
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
