Predictive Analytics World is a little over a week away. I hope you’re planning to be in San Francisco for this exciting conference. This is the first time that SAS Publishing will participate in the event, and I am really looking forward to it. We’re teaming up with the Analytics
Do you want your report to look good on the web, or to look good when you print it? Pick one. Before the SAS Report file format, that was the choice that you faced. HTML is perfect for the web browser. It's easy to scroll through tables, to apply an
Citing online job postings reviewed by talent data firm Wanted Analytics, and a Software Advice blog by Michael Koploy, APICS e-News reports that "Demand planning analysts" are hot -- one of the five hottest careers in logistics. (Free subscription to APICS e-News) Clearly, APICS means there are a lot of good jobs
In the March issue of SAS Publishing News, you'll find an interview with SAS technical editor Mike Boyd. I decided to put the spotlight on this multi-talented man for many reasons: Technical editors typically don’t receive the recognition they deserve. I’ve sought Mike’s expertise on a number of marketing projects and
Unlike BASE SAS tables, OLAP cubes must exist in within the metadata in order to access from any of the OLAP Viewers. In addition to having some metadata OLAP cubes have a physical file structure presence (at least for MOLAP/HOLAP because it's a different story for ROLAP). When you refresh
I recently blogged about Mahalanobis distance and what it means geometrically. I also previously showed how Mahalanobis distance can be used to compute outliers in multivariate data. But how do you compute Mahalanobis distance in SAS? Computing Mahalanobis distance with built-in SAS procedures and functions There are several ways to
Recently I complained about the stock art used on The BFD blog header. So I was foaming with excitement when Alison Bolen (who oversees the SAS blogging platform) kindly took notice, and enlisted Mr. Blackwell to come up with something more pleasing and appropriate. OMG Mr. Blackwell!!! As a huge fan of
On Thursday, February 23, SAS Press acquisitions editor Shelley Sessoms and I will take questions about getting published, why you should publish with us and the publishing industry in general. If you like our books or have considered writing your own SAS or JMP book, join us on Twitter at
One of the cool things with SAS OLAP Viewer in Add-in to Microsoft Office is your ability to skip right into a specific value. Out of the box, viewing OLAP cubes can lead you to believe that in order to view a specific value you need to click-thru a hierarchy
Teachers have more than enough to juggle each day, lacking the time to search for, and find, high-quality curricular resources online. When I would search for lesson plan supplements, I would often get lost in Google's abyss of results, spending far too much precious time sifting through mediocre materials. Until
The SAS DATA step supports a special syntax for determining whether a value is contained in an interval: y = (-2 < x < 2); This expression creates an indicator variable with the value 1 if x is in the interval (-2,2) and 0 otherwise. There is not a standard
This week's SAS author's tip comes from Randy Collica and his new book Customer Segmentation and Clustering Using SAS Enterprise Miner, Second Edition. Randy, a Senior Solutions Architect for SAS, is extremely knowledgeable and approachable. In his new book, Randy uses SAS Enterprise Miner and the most commonly available techniques for customer
I have previously blogged about how to convert a covariance matrix into a correlation matrix in SAS (and the other way around). However, I still get questions about it, perhaps because my previous post demonstrated more than one way to accomplish each transformation. To eliminate all confusion, the following SAS/IML
I love dogs. Not to the extent that Rick Santorum has to be concerned. And not to the extent of actually having a dog as a pet. But man-dog love has become an issue in the 2012 US presidential campaign, and I thought The BFD readers should know my stance
I previously described how to use Mahalanobis distance to find outliers in multivariate data. This article takes a closer look at Mahalanobis distance. A subsequent article will describe how you can compute Mahalanobis distance. Distance in standard units In statistics, we sometimes measure "nearness" or "farness" in terms of the
Building Business Intelligence Using SAS: Content Development Examples by Tricia Aanderud and Angela Hall just published this month. This highly anticipated book—called “a must read for anyone using SAS® BI”* —is a quick-start guide that will help users move quickly from using only one of the SAS BI Clients to
History is easy to explain. We can always come up with some story for why this or that occurred. And, if the story sounds plausible enough, the explanation will be accepted as true. But can we ever know that the explanation is correct? How would we ever test it? If we
How we love shortcuts. Our life seems more efficient with them. I try to take the earlier train for a good parking spot that lets me exit early. Actually change that to any spot (my train station has tons of commuters with FEW parking spaces so getting up early is the
The 8th annual Krispy Kreme Challenge race was just held in downtown Raleigh, NC. This event was started in 2004 as a dare among a few NC State undergrads. They had this idea to race 2 miles to the local Krispy Kreme doughnuts, down a dozen of the confections, and
Way back when I learned to program, I remember a computer instructor explaining that an IF-THEN statement can be a relatively slow operation. He said "If a multiplication takes one unit of time, an IF statement requires about 70 units." I don't know where his numbers came from, or even
I have a love-hate relationship with spreadsheet data. I am interested in finding data to analyze, and if it arrives in the form of a spreadsheet, I'll take it. And I like to deliver results and reports, but often my constituents ask for it as a spreadsheet that they can
As SAS user Marje Fecht said "We all want a 'SAS programming assistant' to help us complete our jobs more quickly." Fecht, Senior Partner at Prowerk Consulting, then went on to say "In her book SAS Macro Programming Made Easy, Second Edition, Michele Burlew encourages us to take advantage of the SAS
As a little girl growing up in rural North Carolina, I remember going to my Granddaddy’s fishing pond. My Daddy and Granddaddy loved to fish but as a six-year-old the fishing was boring to me. I was more interested in finding the worms to put on the fish hook. I’d
The American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials recently released a top 10 list of transportation issues that will be “talked, written or tweeted and legislated about” in 2012. As expected, funding constraints and Congressional action on reauthorization appear on the list but the group also notes that natural disaster
Unlike prior versions of SAS OLAP technology, 9.2 provides more options for maintaining and refreshing OLAP cubes. With this comes some discussion about what each one does alone, and how pairing these techniques really provides SAS OLAP Server Administrators and cube developers a cornucopia of OLAP options. PROC OLAPOPERATE Remember
A variance-covariance matrix expresses linear relationships between variables. Given the covariances between variables, did you know that you can write down an invertible linear transformation that "uncorrelates" the variables? Conversely, you can transform a set of uncorrelated variables into variables with given covariances. The transformation that works this magic is
Some ideas sound great (combining chocolate with peanut butter) and turn out great (Reese's Peanut Butter Cup). Some ideas sound great (getting a face lift) but turn out bad (Kenny Rogers, Greta Van Susteren). Some ideas sound bad (a Run-DMC / Aerosmith duet) but turn out great ("Walk This Way"). Some ideas sound bad (letting
More than 1,000 attendees from all facets of the Publishing industry gathered in New York in January for the 2012 Digital Book World Conference. Not surprisingly, the topic of eBooks and their impact on the industry was a focal point of the three day event. Many of the presentations, the
Many of the chapters in my new book Building Business Intelligence Using SAS: Content Development Examples were straightforward to write but one in particular was the beast. Neither Tricia nor I wanted to tackle the SAS BI Dashboard chapter. Just chalk it up to no major work experience with this
In less than two weeks, I’ll be in sunny Florida attending a brand new conference. According to their Web site, Statistical Practice 2012 aims to bring together hundreds of statistical practitioners, including data analysts, researchers and scientists who engage in the application of statistics to solve real-world problems on a daily basis.
