I recently attended the Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS) Conference in Austin, Texas. The MMIS conference is an annual event for federal and state HHS agencies to share programmatic and technology initiatives in Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Programs (CHIP). While I have attended numerous MMIS conferences in the past, I
I previously showed how to generate random numbers in SAS by using the RAND function in the DATA step or by using the RANDGEN subroutine in SAS/IML software. These functions generate a stream of random numbers. (In statistics, the random numbers are usually a sample from a distribution such as
You’ve gotten to know Stacey Hamilton; now it’s time to learn more about SAS Press acquisitions editor John West! John West typically works on programming and statistics titles and has been with SAS Publishing for 22 years: He started at SAS as a proofreader, then moved into technical editing where
At least, that's according to my colleague, Rick Wicklin. In a recent blog post, Rick points out that estimating popularity based on results of Google searches is a bad idea. Well, that just disqualified my claim that PROC REPORT is more popular than PROC TABULATE, as measured via a GoogleFight.
While talking to SAS users in Australia earlier this month, I often demonstrated the capabilities of the new Map Chart task in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3. Creating map charts has never been easier: select your map data source, then select your response data source, and click Run. Voila! You've got
Was the SAS Insight Series in New Zealand and Australia a prelude to the Rugby World Cup? Perhaps it was, even if you cannot find it on the list of official events. But consider these coincidences: Like the Rugby World Cup, my trip was also sponsored by MasterCard. (Okay...not
One of the highly visible changes in SAS 9.3 is the fact that the old LISTING destination is no longer the default destination for ODS output. Instead, the HTML destination is the default. One positive consequence of this is that ODS graphics and tables are interlaced in the output. Another
This week's SAS author's tip comes from a large green book that many of you are familiar with: A Step-by-Step Approach to Using SAS for Univariate & Multivariate Statistics, Second Edition by Norm O'Rourke, Larry Hatcher, and Edward J. Stepanski. Despite its massive size, this isn't an intimidating text. The authors ease you
Exploring correlation between variables is an important part of exploratory data analysis. Before you start to model data, it is a good idea to visualize how variables related to one another. Zach Mayer, on his Modern Toolmaking blog, posted code that shows how to display and visualize correlations in R.
We had a tornado in April, an earthquake on Tuesday, a drought all summer, and a hurricane arrives on Saturday. All I can figure is that Cary, NC has way too many sinners per capita. What's next -- pestilence? The BFD Makeover The BFD (and all SAS blogs) will now be
The recent budget debate between President Obama and Congress reminded me of many of the discussions I observed during my years as State Controller and Deputy State Budget Officer in North Carolina. These discussions are related specifically to principles adhered to in budget development and budget deliberations by elected officials.
You can generate a set of random numbers in SAS that are uniformly distributed by using the RAND function in the DATA step or by using the RANDGEN subroutine in SAS/IML software. (These same functions also generate random numbers from other common distributions such as binomial and normal.) The syntax
The highway system traversing the United States quietly hit a milestone last month with the 55th anniversary of the Federal Aid Highway Act. In 1956 President Eisenhower had a vision for our nation’s infrastructure; he knew that building an interstate highway system was vital, and expressed that “Together, the united
Just got some time to begin playing with the 9.3 Enterprise Business Intelligence installation on my SAS laptop. As I was testing out the web applications, SASWebDoc opened but I couldn't get to the SAS login screen up to access the SAS Stored Process web application. First I started perusing my
NOTE: SAS stopped shipping the SAS/IML Studio interface in 2018. It is no longer supported, so this article is no longer relevant. When I write SAS/IML programs, I usually do my development in the SAS/IML Studio environment. Why? There are many reasons, but the one that I will discuss today
Creating shared prompts to use across the various BI clients requires the use of SAS Management Console's stored process wizard. Editing these prompts after they have been shared requires some forethought. The important thing to consider when making any changes to a prompt's properties is the impact these changes could
Some people search the Internet for a set of topics and then use the number of search results ("hits") for each topic to rank the relative popularity of the topics. At the 2011 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM), I had the opportunity to attend several talks by statisticians from Google and
The new, third edition of Frederick Pratter’s Web Development with SAS by Example recently came out to great fanfare. Updated for SAS 9.2 and SAS Enterprise BI Server 4.3, Web Development with SAS by Example, Third Edition, introduces readers to Web programming using real-world examples and SAS Web programming tools. So
I've previously described ways to solve systems of linear equations, A*b = c. While discussing the relative merits of the solving a system for a particular right hand side versus solving for the inverse matrix, I made the assertion that it is faster to solve a particular system than it
I'm currently enjoying the Australian "winter" as I travel around the region talking to SAS customers for the SAS Insight Series. It just so happens that I was in Perth, Western Australia for Australia's Census Night. Because I was in the country on this special day, I was compelled
This week’s featured SAS author’s tip comes from SAS user extraordinaire Ron Cody. Honestly, because Ron has written so many SAS books, I could probably feature a year’s worth of tips from his work alone. To find something useful in any of Ron’s books, one merely needs to let the
In order to support a SAS Server Architecture, administrators must know where all the log files from the various SAS Business Intelligence services are located. By default, each service that generates a log will create it within the services' own configuration folder structure. For example, the metadata server log is
This article describes the SAS/IML CHOOSE function: how it works, how it doesn't work, and how to use it to make your SAS/IML programs more compact. In particular, the CHOOSE function has a potential "gotcha!" that you need to understand if you want your program to perform as expected. What
When I was at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) last week, a SAS customer asked me whether it was possible to use the SGPLOT procedure to produce side-by-side bar charts. The answer is "yes" in SAS 9.3, thanks to the new GROUPDISPLAY= option on the VBAR and HBAR statements. For
The SAS/IML language provides two functions for solving a nonsingular nxn linear system A*x = c: The INV function numerically computes the inverse matrix, A-1. You can use this to solve for x: Ainv = inv(A); x = Ainv*c;. The SOLVE function numerically computes the particular solution, x, for a
In the SAS/IML language, the index creation operator (:) is used to construct a sequence of integer values. For example, the expression 1:7 creates a row vector with seven elements: 1, 2, ..., 7. It is important to know the precedence of matrix operators. When I was in grade school,
I bet that many of you reading our blog are familiar with accomplished SAS users and authors Lauren Haworth, Cynthia Zender, and Michele Burlew. Together, they form a powerful triumvirate of SAS experience. If you get a chance to pick up their book Output Delivery System: The Basics and Beyond
I've previously discussed how to find the root of a univariate function. This article describes how to find the root (zero) of a function of several variables by using Newton's method. There have been many papers, books, and dissertations written on the topic of root-finding, so why am I blogging
At the SAS/IML Support Community, a SAS/IML programmer recently asked how to find "the root of a complicated equation." That's a huge question, and many papers and books have been written on the topic of root-finding, also known as finding the zeros of a function. Everyone has favorite techniques for
One of the great innovations with SAS 9.3 is the focus on ODS statistical graphics. "Wait a minute," you're thinking, "weren't ODS graphics added in SAS 9.2?" Yes, that's true. But with SAS 9.3 there is even more capability: more analytical SAS procedures support the graphs, and there are more
