In honor of last night’s 63rd Primetime Emmy Awards, I thought it would be fun to unveil a recent SAS Publishing video featuring SAS user and student ambassador Isabel Perry. I had the good fortune of being introduced to Isabel at SAS Global Forum 2011, thanks to colleague and master of connections Elizabeth Ceranowski, after
One of the sweet new capabilities in 9.2 OLAP for cube developers is the Cube Job that is automatically created for each new cube. The job is used as a interface mechanism to schedule the cube refresh code without manually retrieving the PROC OLAP code and customizing it for scheduling which we "old"
My colleague Udo Sglavo is back, responding to comments on his guest blog from two weeks ago. For fans of SAS and R, he shows how to incorporate results from Hyndman's R model into SAS. Do the Evolution After publishing my blog on replicating Rob J Hyndman’s cross validation idea
Like millions of other Americans, I recently was asked to make a decision of tremendous importance to my household -- a decision that would affect the welfare of everyone in my family. That decision, of course, was whether to continue to receive Netflix movies by mail, or opt for the
The other day I encountered a SAS Knowledge Base article that shows how to count the number of missing and nonmissing values for each variable in a data set. However, the code is a complicated macro that is difficult for a beginning SAS programmer to understand. (Well, it was hard
When trying to write out graphics to a specific filename location, the gsfname option is only honored when ODS LISTING is turned on and ODS HTML is turned off. This is especially important in 9.3 Base SAS as the ODS HTML option is the default output destination. Enterprise Guide users
Last week I showed a graph of the number of US births for each day in 2002, which shows a strong day-of-the-week effect. The graph also shows that the number of births on a given day is affected by US holidays. This blog post looks closer at the holiday effect.
As schools across the country delve into a new year, I want to bring my readers back to teaching basics with Part 2 of my Three R’s series on Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships. Here's Part 1. As students flood our halls and classrooms, are they eager and excited for the challenging year ahead? Do
SAS 9.3 is here! In addition to the many new features and enhancements to the software, you will find changes to the SAS documentation as well. For example, the SAS Product Documentation page on support.sas.com has been redesigned to help you find information faster. These changes are presented in the
As I mentioned in my introductory post about Windows PowerShell, you can use PowerShell commands as a simple and concise method to collect data from your Windows systems -- information that is ripe for analysis within SAS. In this example, I'll show a technique for using a SAS program to
Look at the following graphs showing one weekly time series. The left hand shows the actual time series plot. To the less statistically inclined this plot might indicate that the data is seasonal due to the troughs during summer and the peaks during winter. However, if you were to use
My son, a senior in high school, recently announced his latest book assignment for his English AP class. “I need Portrait of the Artist for my English class.” (Usually this announcement comes just after the stores have closed and when he needs it really soon.) Ah! I HAVE a copy
I've been spending my weekends developing a SAS Publishing book proposal. (For those interested, it involves learning how to fully leverage SAS Stored Processes as a beginning programmer.) Creating examples and jumping between coding, testing and then writing about everything, I have had a heck of a time with my
Polynomials are used often in data analysis. Low-order polynomials are used in regression to model the relationship between variables. Polynomials are used in numerical analysis for numerical integration and Taylor series approximations. It is therefore important to be able to evaluate polynomials in an efficient manner. My favorite evaluation technique
In this guest blog, my colleague Snurre Jensen (Analytic Solutions Manager, SAS EMEA Technology Practice) discusses a fine point regarding the word “seasonality” in time series forecasting. When we see general ups and downs in the data that tend to repeat year after year, we commonly refer to this as
Rick Wicklin and I are engaged in an arms race of birthday-related blog posts. To recap: Rick analyzed national data about births in the USA and what time of year they are most likely to occur. I responded by analyzing the birthdays of my Facebook friends. Rick responded by analyzing
My friend Chris posted an analysis of the distribution of birthdays for 236 of his Facebook friends. He noted that more of his friends have birthdays in April than in September. The numbers were 28 for April, but only 25 for September. As I reported in my post on "the
The downturn in the economy beginning in 2008 and continuing even to now has put tremendous pressure on local governments to do “less with less”. In the past when economic downturns caused service level cut backs the cry was to do “more with less”. The idea was to identify ways
As I have previously mentioned, SAS 9.3 has some sweet new functionality for stored processes. The topic of the prior post was on storing .sas code for the stored process directly within the metadata and how to edit/access that raw code. Did you know that the 'Edit Source Code' button
Windows PowerShell is one of my favorite tools to use for gathering information from my PC and network, and also for automating processes. If you are familiar with UNIX shells (such as Korn shell or its variants), you will probably be very comfortable with Windows PowerShell. Just like its UNIX
You can extend the capability of the SAS/IML language by writing modules. A module is a user-defined function. You can define a module by using the START and FINISH statements. Many people, including myself, define modules at the top of the SAS/IML program in which they are used. You can
Earlier today, Rick posted interesting information about which time of year the most babies are born, at least in the USA. I don't have data nearly as extensive as what's available at the NCHS, but I do have a sample of birthday records to compare against Rick's findings. My sample
This week's SAS author's tip is perfect for SAS programmers using PROC SQL. Author Howard Schreier is a member of the SAS-L Hall of Fame, an independent consultant and trainer, and has been using SAS since 1981. His book PROC SQL by Example: Using SQL within SAS is also an
I mentioned back in 2008 that Web Reports with OLAP source can drill-through to detail (or display the raw data records for the corresponding cross tabular cell) only after the source information map has drill-through to detail enabled. Well, there are several other areas that also could disable this capability
Do you know someone who has a birthday in mid-September? Odds are that you do: the middle of September is when most US babies are born, according to data obtained from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Web site (see Table 1-16). There's an easy way to remember this
For years mathematicians have been pondering the Monty Hall Problem – you know, the old TV show where you have 3 doors and behind one door is a car (or some nice prize) and behind the other two doors are goats (or some undesirable prize). You pick door #1. But
I use Google Reader to keep up with SAS-related conversations on the blogosphere. I thought it would be nice to share the lists of blogs that I follow as "shared bundles". If you also use Google Reader, it will be very easy for you to add these bundles to
‘Context’ defined (as cited from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary): 1: the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning; and, 2: the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs: environment, setting. While context is clearly important, today it is consistently
In BI Dashboard 4.3, you have the ability to edit or entirely remove the frame around an indicator. When in the dashboard edit screen, select the indicator and on the right hand side update the Object name with the frame title to display. When viewing this indicator from the Portal
Looping is essential to statistical programming. Whether you need to iterate over parameters in an algorithm or indices in an array, a loop is often one of the first programming constructs that a beginning programmer learns. Today is the first anniversary of this blog, which is named The DO Loop,
