On this blog, I've delivered a few tips about using SAS formats to stratify your data values "in place" without having to actually change your data. The most recent example addressed date and datetime variables. My previous examples included simple SAS programs that you can run in SAS display manager
The other day someone posted the following question to the SAS-L discussion list: Is there a SAS PROC out there that takes a multi-category discrete variable with character categories and converts it to a single numeric coded variable (not a set of dummy variables) with the character categories assigned as
I have previously dealt independently with issues of forecasting, planning, and budgeting in separate posts, and the time has now come to pull them all together in one place and just come out and say what I really mean. This integrative post was prompted by a recent invitation I received
Healthcare was one of five sectors looked in the Pleased to Meet You research (the other four were Banking, Supermarkets, Soft Drinks, and Mobile). In the UK the majority of healthcare is publicly funded, and so healthcare was chosen to as a representative of the public sector. It allows us
I got an email asking the following question: In the following program, I don't know how many variables are in the data set A. However, I do know that the variable names are X1–Xk for some value of k. How can I read them all into a SAS/IML matrix when
As the Basel Accords continue to drum up attention in the global financial markets, many institutions are looking at how they can strike a balance between capital requirements and competitive advantage. One area of focus is consumer credit risk modelling and scoring, as the more accurate and robust the models
I have previously written about how to create funnel plots in SAS software. A funnel plot is a way to compare the aggregated performance of many groups without ranking them. The groups can be states, counties, schools, hospitals, doctors, airlines, and so forth. A funnel plot graphs a performance metric
Are you a book glutton, stick figure, or something in between? Does your consumption of books outweigh other interests, such as sleeping? Or are you a minimalistic reader? I’ve always tended toward reading gluttony. For me, it all started in elementary school. A classmate read 100 books before 3rd grade
The heatmap is a graphical representation of a table where colors are used to represent the values in the table. This is an effective graphic for finding the minimum and maximum values across the table and may surface patterns in the data. With the addition of the HEATMAPPARM statement to
I my past blog posts I have written mostly about K-12 education. This is mainly because I think K-12 is over-ripe for reform in so many ways. School districts could learn a great deal from other industries and higher education in terms of data usage, reporting and analysis of students, programs and
Yes, it’s a holiday week, which means Thanksgiving-related posts and people telling you what they’re thankful for. You know it, you love it. So here’s my shot: I’m thankful for new editions. That’s right—second editions, third editions—if it’s new and updated, I’m all for it. Go with me on this….
Here's a quick tip to keep in mind when you write SAS/IML programs: although the SAS/IML documentation lists about 300 functions that are built into the SAS/IML language, you can also call hundreds of functions in Base SAS. Furthermore, you can pass in SAS/IML vectors for arguments to the functions.
Paul Goodwin's Hot New Research column is a must-read in each issue of Foresight. The current column, "High on Complexity, Low on Evidence: Are Advanced Forecasting Methods Always as Good as They Seem?" ends with this sage advice: If the name of a method contains more words than the number of observations that
This week's SAS author's tip comes from Gerhard Svolba, author of Data Preparation for Analytics Using SAS and the upcoming book Data Quality for Analytics Using SAS. Gerhard is a product manager and pre-sales consultant at SAS in Austria. Gerhard wrote his first book on analytics about five years ago and
If you’ve taken one of my SAS classes you may recall “Mark’s 3 rules of programming”, the first of which is “Lazy programmers are GOOD programmers.” One of the things I love about best about SAS programming is the plethora of functions and shortcuts built into the language, all designed
Just today we published a new “success story,” our term for customer testimonial, with a great customer of ours, Chubb. As I was reading through the story, I realized what a complex environment insurance marketers find themselves in, especially when independent insurance agents are in the mix, issuing the policies
Halloween night was rainy, so many fewer kids knocked on the door than usual. Consequently, I'm left with a big bucket of undistributed candy. One evening as I treated myself to a mouthful of tooth decay, I chanced to open a package of Wonka® Bottle Caps. The package contained three
Rick posted a tip today about using abbreviations in the SAS program editor window (often referred to as the "enhanced editor"). Defining abbreviations is a great way to save keystrokes and re-use "templates" of code that you've squirreled away. (One of Rick's readers also picked up on the tip, and
In Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Newton summarized a phenomenon that applies equally well to innovation and to Newtonian Mechanics: “The vis insita, or innate force of matter, is a power of resisting by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavours to preserve its present state, whether it
I recently attended The Education Trust’s 2011 National Conference on closing gaps and raising achievement for ALL students. This was my first Ed Trust event and I walked away baffled by the data about the inequities in our education system, and the persistent gaps between the affluent and impoverished. First,
When I moved last year from Denver to the Washington, DC area people told me to prepare myself for the long hours I would spend in my car. I had no idea. It takes forever to get anywhere. Once, during a snowstorm it took me 9 hours to drive 10
Did you know that you can define "abbreviations" in the SAS enhanced editor? These handy little shortcuts can save you a lot of typing. For example, I have an abbreviation for the string _iml. Whenever I type _iml, the editor prompts me to replace those four characters with the following
SAS CEO Jim Goodnight is passionate about education reform. The fruits of that passion are evident in SAS' philanthropic efforts and in the many public speeches Dr. Goodnight gives on the topic. Earlier this month, we covered his visit to the Kelley School of Business. Last week, he was the
Here is a little trick to file away. Given a row vector of zeros and ones, thought of as representing a number in base 2, the following SAS/IML statements compute the decimal value of that vector. proc iml; x = {1 0 0 1 1 1}; /* number in base
I've been working with date-time data on a recent project, and I've come across a few SAS programs that have "opportunity for improvement" when it comes time to create reports. (Or maybe I haven't, and I contrived this entire blog post so that I could reference one of my favorite
One aspect of blogging that I enjoy is getting feedback from readers. Usually I get statistical or programming questions, but every so often I receive a comment from someone who stumbled across a blog post by way of an internet search. This morning I received the following delightful comment on
Are you always looking for that inside perspective? Most of us are! As we all know, customers are the primary – perhaps exclusive – source of cash flow for many organizations. Knowing which ones are most profitable is critical to maximizing future economic value. To help today's marketing and business leaders learn
As mentioned in a previous post, We had the pleasure to sponsor the eMetrics Marketing Optimization conference again this year with a marketing lab. Our featured story was an innovative use of customer analytics by Organic, a digital marketing agency and SAS customer. We highlighted how Organic worked with their client Pulte
If you want to extract values from a SAS/IML vector, use the subscripting operation, such as in the following example: proc iml; x = {A B C D E}; y = x[{1 2 3}]; /* {A,B,C} */ The vector y contains the first three elements of x. However, did you
Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE) is the most commonly used forecasting performance metric, and for good reason, the most disparaged. When we compute the absolute percent error the usual way, as APE = | Forecast - Actual | / Actual this is undefined when Actual = 0. It can also lead to
