Everyone is short on time. Fortunately, SAS user and consultant Phil Holland isn't short on ideas. Phil wrote Saving Time and Money Using SAS a couple of years ago and it has become a go-to reference for users around the globe. Phil is one of the most dynamic people I know. If you
For all of you who have ever been to Heidelberg, location of the headquarters of SAS Germany and the place where I live, you might know that a town called Mannheim is nearby. Some might even know that Mannheim is the place where a genius German engineer called Carl Benz
You can still get a paper proposal in for SAS Global Forum 2012. All you need is an idea. And probably some data. And also, some techniques for analyzing that data. Oh, and some conclusions would be helpful as well. I know: you are a busy person! You might not
Sometimes you want to label only certain observations in a plot. This is useful in many ways, but one use is to label outliers on a scatter plot. In the SGPLOT procedure, the DATALABEL= option enables you to specify the name of a variable that is used to label observations.
Do you enjoy talking about SAS statistics and SAS books? Do you know what Twitter is? If you can honestly answer "yes" to both (or is that all 3) questions, then this post is for you. Tomorrow, SAS Publishing will host its second ever Twitter chat. This time around, we've invited SAS
The popular mailing list for the SAS user community hits a milestone this weekend by turning 25. 25 is often referred to as the "silver anniversary", but for a quarter century SAS users have found gold among the messages in this list, which feature everything from questions and answers about
Drill-through to detail is the ability to right click within a cell of a web report or OLAP viewer and request the detail source records that make up that specific cell's measure. The maximum number of records, by default, is set to 300,000. Feasibly the report user could download all
I started working with a large financial services customer recently that’s implementing an enterprise-level strategic analytic application. If they’re successful, these analytics will be a game changer for this organization. Unfortunately, I can’t discuss what they’re implementing, but the analytics enable a key business strategy, and this initiative has the
I was at the Wikipedia site the other day, looking up properties of the Chi-square distribution. I noticed that the formula for the median of the chi-square distribution with d degrees of freedom is given as ≈ d(1-2/(9d))3. However, there is no mention of how well this formula approximates the
Celebrity fame (I'm told) is overrated. Do you really want hordes of people to recognize you in the shopping mall or while you wait at a red light? Of course you don't. And that's why I advise you to never win the American Idol competition (nor should you lose with
Sometimes you can't forecast worth a darn because something is just not forecastable. Being "unforecastable" doesn't mean you can't create a forecast, because you can always create a forecast. It just means there is so much instability or randomness in your demand patterns that even sophisticated forecasting methods don't help
JSM, Miami Beach, FL, July 31–August 3 Miami Beach in August is hot. Ridiculously hot. Almost as hot as our preview copies at this show. Conference goers were extremely excited about a number of our upcoming statistics titles, including Customer Segmentation and Clustering Using SAS® Enterprise Miner™, Second Edition, by
What do you call an interview on Twitter? A Tw-interview? A Twitter-view? Regardless of what you call it, I'm going to be involved in a "live chat" on Twitter this coming Thursday, 10NOV2011, 1:30–2:00pm ET. The hashtag is #saspress. Shelly Goodin (@SASPublishing) and SAS Press author recruiter Shelley Sessoms (@SSessoms)
Life Lesson from a Black Eye I'm fond of arguing that Plato is the father of philosophy. Apparently that is the wrong argument to make, in a bar, with a stranger, when said stranger takes the opposing view. (And I thought politics, religion, and his mother were the only things never
I just returned from the largest annual gathering of upstream oil and gas technology professionals. Some of the brightest minds in resource exploration – from graduate students to 50-year professionals – enjoyed the masquerade carnival that filled the exhibit hall on Halloween night. But the real entertainment was in the sessions.
This is a question I am often asked: What skills do I need to become a good analyst or data miner? In order to become good data mining practitioner one needs to understand statistical concepts and basic principles of knowledge induction. Knowing inferential stats, t-tests, analysis of variance, regressions, and
Last week I showed how to use the UNIQUE-LOC technique to iterate over categories in a SAS/IML program. The observant reader might have noticed that the algorithm, although general, could be made more efficient if the data are sorted by categories. The UNIQUEBY Technique Suppose that you want to compute
Welcome to this new blog on data visualization at SAS. Our goal is to engage with you on a discussion about analytical and business graphics for reporting and interactive applications. Our primary focus will be on ODS Graphics and related topics, but we look forward to a lively discussion on all things
Among the suitable-for-blog-publication-without-risking-my-job definitions of masochism is this: A willingness or tendency to subject oneself to unpleasant or trying experiences So to be a forecaster, must you also be a masochist? Few people enjoy the difficulties and degradation that go with being a forecaster, so few are willing to do it
Imagine you are standing on the corner of a very busy intersection in the middle of downtown New York City. It's the peak of rush hour and you need to get across the street in a hurry. And, oh yeah, you're blindfolded. This was one of the various scenarios discussed
Sandra Schlotzhauer's book Elementary Statistics Using SAS has been described by SAS Press as "bridging the gap between statistics texts and SAS documentation." It's packed with a wealth of useful and easy-to-follow information. In opening up the book to select this week's tip, it was difficult deciding on just one excerpt. After looking
I've had the pleasure to work closely this year with the Association of National Advertisers on a Thought Leadership Sponsorship. One of my favorite outcomes of that effort was an e-Magazine titled, "Measures for Success - How to become a more accountable marketing organization." The title article of that eMagazine
On September 10, 2001, I was attending a law enforcement conference in Atlantic City, NJ. While I have attended hundreds of similar meetings, this conference stands out for several reasons. First, and most obvious, it was the eve of the day where most of our lives were indelibly altered. Second,
Being able to reshape data is a useful skill in data analysis. Most of the time you can use the TRANSPOSE procedure or the SAS DATA step to reshape your data. But the SAS/IML language can be handy, too. I only use PROC TRANSPOSE a few times per year, so
Let’s face it. Not everybody has eaten, slept, and lived statistics since kindergarten. Some folks have even gone through their undergraduate years without so much as opening a statistics book. What do they do when they get to, say, business school and find out about something called “business analytics”? Well,
It’s mid-afternoon. Day 2 of the PRG2 class. Students return satiated from lunch. Some slipped into this course without taking PRG1 so they missed out on some basics. I’m trying to explain how SAS thinks. I use slides, draw pix, do everything except break into dance to get their attention.
The average executive at the average company has probably never seen the words “imagination” and “analytics” juxtaposed in the same sentence. There was nothing average about the thirty plus high-impact and high-intellect executives who convened for the Atlanta Power Series. This group demonstrated that there is nothing average about the
My mother-in-law threw down the gauntlet today and created her first email account. While it’s the longest email address I’ve ever seen, she’s taken a giant step into our digital world. And while she’s a very hip and independent 60-something woman, I am still sort of reeling from her change
In the last year, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight and a group of R&D, Education, Sales and Marketing executives visited several universities that are in the early stages of adopting analytics within their business programs. To that effort, Goodnight addressed faculty and students at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business on
This blog post is a "mashup" of a couple of my previous posts, combining the lessons to create something brand new that I hope you will find useful. First, let's review what we know: SAS Enterprise Guide supports a scriptable object model, which allows you to write scripts or programs
