Here at SAS Press, we offer a strong, stable publishing team with over 55 years of combined experience. But as a potential author (or even current one) or fan of our press, you might want to get a better feel for the people behind the book. Thus a new feature,
In a previous article, I discussed random jittering as a technique to reduce overplotting in scatter plots. The example used data that are rounded to the nearest unit, although the idea applies equally well to ordinal data in general. The act of jittering (adding random noise to data) is a
Last week, I attended the International Center for Leadership in Education’s Model Schools Conference in Nashville, TN, where I learned about many forward-thinking education initiatives taking place across the country. My colleagues and I also had the privilege of facilitating a SAS(r) EVAAS for K-12 presentation from two principals at
Jittering. To a statistician, it is more than what happens when you drink too much coffee. Jittering is the act of adding random noise to data in order to prevent overplotting in statistical graphs. Overplotting can occur when a continuous measurement is rounded to some convenient unit. This has the
So we all know that "35" is the "new 24". Or something like that. In any event, my incredible employer SAS celebrates its 35th anniversary today and has retained its youthful cutting-edge viability while combining it with the wisdom that comes with longevity. And the company culture within SAS reflects
The area under a density estimate curve gives information about the probability that an event occurs. The simplest density estimate is a histogram, and last week I described a few ways to compute empirical estimates of probabilities from histograms and from the data themselves, including how to construct the empirical
Would you like to have a clearer understanding of your customers? If so, this week's featured SAS Author's Tip delivers the goods. SAS Press author Randy Collica is a Senior Solutions Architect for SAS and his book CRM Segmentation and Clustering: Using SAS Enterprise Miner contains a lot of how-to
In my statistical analysis of coupons article, I presented a scatter plot that includes the identity line, y=x. This post describes how to write a general program that uses the SGPLOT procedure in SAS 9.2. By a "general program," I mean that the program produces the result based on the
Have you written a popular SAS Global Forum paper? Have you shared a winning case study with your colleagues? Have you talked about a cool, new feature you found in SAS? Well, share it with the world! SAS Press can help you share your knowledge and expertise worldwide. We’ve published
In Base SAS you can use the DATASETS procedure to determine the SAS data sets in a library, and you can use the DELETE statement to delete data sets. Did you know that you can do the same operations from within the SAS/IML language? The following DATA step creates four
About a year ago (wow, has it been that long?), I posted an example program that lets you report on the contents of a SAS information map. Using my example, you can see the data items, filters, and folder structure within a given information map. Last week a reader posted
Readers' comments indicate that my previous blog article about computing the area under an ROC curve was helpful. Great! There is another common application of numerical integration: finding the area under a density estimation curve. This article provides an overview of density estimation and computes an empirical cumulative density function.
Many of you may be familiar with SAS Press author and consultant Don Henderson. Besides being the author of Building Web Applications with SAS/IntrNet: A Guide to the Application Dispatcher, Don is very active in the SAS user community--including being a frequent paper presenter and contributor to sascommunity.org. So, not
This is Part 4 of my response to Charlie Huang's interesting article titled Top 10 most powerful functions for PROC SQL. As I did for eaerlier topics, I will examine one of the "powerful" SQL functions that Charlie mentions and show how to do the same computation in SAS/IML software.
Today marks the first day of summer and the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. While I can't join the summer solstice celebration at Stonehenge, I can pay homage to some of our sizzling sellers. Many of you are probably familiar with or use some of these
As far as numbers go, the number zero is rather mysterious for data. Is it something or is it nothing? What happens when you have missing data but enter 0? This topic triggered an intriguing discussion in my recent Programming 2: Data Manipulation Techniques class. In this post I’d like
We sometimes take it for granted, but the concept of the "SAS library" is just about one of the most awesome aspects of The SAS System. You can give your library a name (a library reference, or libref), tell the system how to get to your data (options on a
A reader commented to me that he wants to use the HISTOGRAM statement of the SGPLOT procedure to overlay two histograms on a single plot. He could do it, but unfortunately SAS was choosing a large bin width for one of the variables and a small bin width for the
Recently Charlie Huang showed how to use the SAS/IML language to compute an exponentially weighted moving average of some financial data. In the commentary to his analysis, he said: I found that if a matrix or a vector is declared with specified size before the computation step, the program’s efficiency
SAS Press has published 3 popular titles dedicated to demystifying PROC SQL. Today, I've selected Katherine Prairie's book The Essential PROC SQL Handbook for SAS Users to excerpt. One often cited highlight of Katherine's book is that it contains 300 examples of PROC SQL code. Katherine really knows SAS--she's been
SAS-based processes are critical to many organizations, but sometimes the trickiest part of your job falls into one or both of these activities: Getting stuff from the outside world "into" SAS. (Once it's in SAS, as many of you know, the world is your oyster.) Getting the output of your
Each Sunday, my local paper has a starburst image on the front page that proclaims "Up to $169 in Coupons!" (The value changes from week to week.) One day I looked at the image and thought, "Does the paper hire someone to count the coupons? Is this claim a good
While on a recent whirlwind vacation, my husband and I were unexpectedly recruited to participate in a test audience for an upcoming NBC summer series. It was one of the highlights of the trip. It wasn’t the $15 we each earned for an hour of our time and opinions, as
The 2011 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) will be from July 31-August 3 in Miami Beach. Look for acquisitions editor and SAS Press conference mega-maven Shelley Sessoms at the SAS Publishing booth (#504). Shelley can talk with you about: New and forthcoming statistics-related books from SAS Press, including Statistical Analysis for
A colleague asked, "How can I enumerate the levels of a categorical classification variable in SAS/IML software?" The variable was a character variable with n observations, but he wanted the following: A "look-up table" that contains the k (unique) levels of the variable. A vector with n elements that contains
Sometime very recently, probably while you weren't looking, I changed jobs at SAS (yes, again). This time it's a bigger change for me, because I'm no longer part of the SAS R&D organization, where I've worked for nearly 14 years. Instead, I'm part of the team known internally as Professional
My primary purpose in writing The DO Loop blog is to share what I know about statistical programming in general and about SAS programming in particular. But I also write the blog for various personal reasons, including the enjoyment of writing. The other day I encountered a concept on Ajay
No, BONEZONE is not the website of wayward legislators. It is, however, a trade journal of the orthopaedic devices industry, and the Summer 2011 issue features a nice mention of Forecast Value Added (FVA) analysis in an article by Tom Wallace. In "Forecasting: It's Getting Better," Tom refers to FVA
This week's featured tip from SAS Press author Jack Shostak should spark the interest of those of you working in the pharmaceutical or clinical trials industries. While I'm not a programmer, myself, Jack's book has been consistently described as being accessible, practical, and helpful for both beginners and advanced SAS
Receiving a student scholarship to attend PharmaSUG 2011 provided me with an amazing opportunity. It allowed me to look into an aspect of SAS that I may not have otherwise been able to. I got to see how SAS was used in the pharmaceutical industry, and see how I could
