As the Industry Marketing Manager for Education at SAS, I get to talk to lots of education customers about how they’re using SAS software. I hear the many great things they’re doing with SAS and often wonder: What is the secret of their success? So I started working with our
SAS Global Forum 2012 is right around the corner. If you will be in Orlando, too, be sure to say hello! If you have ideas for improving SAS/IML software or you would like to discuss my blog, please visit me during my hours at the SAS/IML booth in the Demo
The start of the year seems to have been full of uncertainty for European financial markets. This seems to apply to everything from Greek debt to bankers’ bonuses and, despite access to so much information about what is happening globally, it remains difficult to understand what is certain fact and
The fundamental units in the SAS/IML language are matrices and vectors. Consequently, you might wonder about conditional expression such as if v>0 then.... What does this expression mean when v contains more than a single element? Evaluating vector expressions When you test a vector for some condition, expressions like v>0
Did that set off a trigger for you? It did for my SAS SQL 1: Essentials class, packed with SQL and SAS programmers alike. To clarify matters I pulled up some examples to help get the differences quickly. Set operators and Joins are similar in that they both combine multiple
We recently held a half-day session devoted entirely to search marketing that gave us an opportunity to cast a wide net internally about this very important topic. I learned some new things and also had a few moments where it seemed the obvious was being presented, but sometimes even "hearing the
This week's tip comes from Ron Cody - SAS author and expert extraordinaire. Ron's written several bestselling SAS Press books including his latest SAS Statistics by Example. If you haven't taken a look at Ron's extensive work, I'd invite you to visit his author page. You can read a free chapter from each of
I remember the first time I saw a Cirque du Soleil® performance—the artistry, the split-second timing, that repeating sense of WOW. I was an instant fan. Funny… but I got that same sense of awe the first time I saw a demo of SAS® Visual Analytics. I’d read the project
Earlier this week I described a common programming pattern in the SAS macro language. The pattern sets up a loop for processing each distinct value of a classification variable. The program uses the PROC SQL SELECT INTO feature to populate SAS macro variables. The effect: you can roll your own
As public safety officials leaf through their favorite criminal justice periodical they are greeted with pages and pages of analytics advertisements. These ads are laden with promises of robust and scalable solutions, improved efficiencies and, yes, the promise of prediction. While reading the advertisements, the mental conversation may go something
Yesterday was one of those (many) days where I felt the pride of working at SAS. It all started when I read a News & Observer article detailing the plight of student journalists at NC State University's newspaper, The Technician, trying to get to St. Louis to cover their beloved Wolfpack
After my post on detecting outliers in multivariate data in SAS by using the MCD method, Peter Flom commented "when there are a bunch of dimensions, every data point is an outlier" and remarked on the curse of dimensionality. What he meant is that most points in a high-dimensional cloud
I've heard many questions during my 6 years as Sales Manager for SAS Publishing. I’ve noticed that we frequently get similar questions from customers. I’ve compiled a few of these frequently asked questions below with answers. I hope this helps. Please let us know what information would help you navigate our books. Question: I am
I have previously spoken about using custom formats and from SAS Information Maps and how they can be used to categorize data differently for your end users. The problem for some is that this requires establishing the format on the SAS server, typically on lockdown by the SAS Administrator. Another
Hello! I hope you had a chance to read about e-Learning in last week’s blog. For those of you who want to see and try e-Learning, please come visit me at the e-Learning booth at SAS Global Forum in Orlando. In the weeks to come I will tell you more
The first quarter of the fiscal year is the time that banking industry analysts provide clients with their vision on the key challenges and solutions in banking for 2012. TowerGroup’s Nicole Sturgill recently wrote that “understanding consumer use of the financial institution’s delivery channels is a critical element” for institutions
Covariance, correlation, and distance matrices are a few examples of symmetric matrices that are frequently encountered in statistics. When you create a symmetric matrix, you only need to specify the lower triangular portion of the matrix. The VECH and SQRVECH functions, which were introduced in SAS/IML 9.3, are two functions
How to write a SAS macro program to repeat your SAS processing for each value of a BY grouping variable.
Art Carpenter’s newest book, Carpenter’s Guide to Innovative SAS Techniques, offers advanced SAS programmers an all-in-one programming reference that includes advanced topics not easily found outside the depths of SAS documentation or more advanced training classes. No matter how you approach the use of SAS software, the techniques provided in
The SAS/IML language supports both row vectors and column vectors. This is useful for performing linear algebra, but it can cause headaches when you are writing a SAS/IML module. I want my modules to be able to handle both row vectors and column vectors. I don't want the user to
When the data is classified by multiple class variables, you can certainly create graphs using BY variables. This results in separate graphs, one for each level of the BY variable crossings. Each graph is scaled by its own data subset, and comparisons across BY levels is harder. When comparisons need to be
Macy's Inc. is one of the nation’s largest and most well-known retailers, with a loyal base of customers who shop at its stores and online. The company’s e-commerce division, Macys.com, is relying on big data and high-performance analytics software from SAS to better understand its customers and help increase overall
When you are constantly taking the data tables and completing joins to begin working on your reports or analysis it might be time to consider creating permanent views. Then you can just add the view to the Enterprise Guide project rather than dealing with the joins in a Query Builder
A recent discussion on the SAS-L discussion forum concerned how to implement linear interpolation in SAS. Some people suggested using PROC EXPAND in SAS/ETS software, whereas others proposed a DATA step solution. For me, the SAS/IML language provides a natural programming environment to implement an interpolation scheme. It also provides
This week's SAS tip on writing LSMEANS statements comes from the big spring-green book A Step-by-Step Approach to Using SAS for Univariate and Multivariate Statistics, Second Edition. Striking in appearance, this comprehensive guide by professors Norm O'Rourke, Larry Hatcher, and Edward J. Stepanski is a great resource for students, researchers, and data analysts.
There's been a lot of conversation recently around SAS High-Performance Analytics. And, rightly so - it's incredibly cool and applicable to every industry imaginable, including financial services. What if your risk calculations had seen the '08 credit collapse in time? CBS SmartPlanet addresses this (and highlights SAS High-Performance Analytics, with
A well-formed WHERE statement or subsetting IF can narrow down the output of your SAS DATA step. The SAS log does a good job of telling you how many records were processed by the action. For example, let's look at this simple DATA step with my "poor man's random sample",
A few weeks ago, in Northern Virginia, a 30 foot highway sign fell onto I-66 and landed on a passing pickup truck. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but it drew media attention and caused motorists in the area to wonder about the safety of other signs and the transportation network
In a recent blog post, we received a comment that, while the Kindle was a favorite eReading device, it wasn’t the choice for technical material. Honestly, this is something we’ve wondered about! We’re seeing that eBooks are becoming more and more popular with SAS users. But, are these books being
There is something that 90% of us admit to doing, and the other 10% will lie about. That, of course, is Googling yourself. As an avid follower of myself, and everything I do, I look forward to a weekly Google Alert that tells me all about what I've been up to.
