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
Policing has profoundly changed over the last several decades and its evolution will continue as long as there are crimes to commit and communities to serve. The very nature of policing is dynamic – it always has been and always will be. Those dynamics are driven by many things –
Over at the SAS/IML Discussion Forum, there have been several posts about how to call a Base SAS functions from SAS/IML when the Base SAS function supports a variable number of arguments. It is easy to call a Base SAS function from SAS/IML software when the syntax for the function
Writing efficient SAS/IML programs is very important. One aspect to efficient SAS/IML programming is to avoid unnecessary DO loops. In my book, Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software, I wrote (p. 80): One way to avoid writing unnecessary loops is to take full advantage of the subscript reduction operators for matrices.
There is nothing the gambler, investor, forecaster, or Match.com dater likes as much as the sure thing. Don't we all? Back in April I stated what I claimed to be a sure thing forecast: In any group of 2 or more people, there is at least one pair of people
The first-annual SPARK! Financial Services Executive Summit used an unexpected approach to collaboration to generate unconventional ideas about the future of financial services. The ideas came from enthusiastic and engaged senior executives from across the financial services industry who are all committed to improving the industry’s image in the eyes
“For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye, Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.” In this famous poem by William Wordsworth, many people believe he is
In a previous blog post, I presented a short SAS/IML function module that implements the trapezoidal rule. The trapezoidal rule is a numerical integration scheme that gives the integral of a piecewise linear function that passes through a given set of points. This article demonstrates an application of using the
Many of you have been following along as I’ve written about the work we’re doing at SAS to evolve our lead generation strategies. This effort has given me a voice with a number of media outlets; allowing me to communicate, with a larger audience, the importance of analytics and integration
In a previous article I discussed the situation where you have a sequence of (x,y) points and you want to find the area under the curve that is defined by those points. I pointed out that usually you need to use statistical modeling before it makes sense to compute the
While school is out (for most) for the summer, many will find this week's SAS Author's tip to be a good primer or refresher about the WHERE statement. Our featured author Sandra Schlotzhauer draws on her extensive career teaching basic statistics to non-statisticians in sharing lessons for grown-ups in her
This year we’re happy to be working with Harvard Business Review on a series of Customer Intelligence Insight Centers and Webinars. The first of those webinars happened recently featuring Harvard Business School Professor Ranjay Gulati. Here are a few teaser sentences from the HBR Blog post. If you’re interested, click-through
As organizations confront the limits of forecasting, they finally realize the folly in a blind pursuit of unachievable levels of forecast accuracy. The best accuracy we can ever hope to achieve is limited by the nature -- the forecastability -- of what we are trying to forecast. Anything better than
I was under the impression that Black Swans were supposed to be rare. Rare enough to be effectively non-computable by standard methods. Nassim Taleb’s formulation of the Black Swan Theory is comprised of the three traits of: outlier (rarity), extreme impact, and retrospective predictability (i.e. 20/20 hindsight). I write this
The other day I was asked, "Given a set of points, what is the area under the curve defined by those points?" As stated, the problem is not well defined. The problem is that "the curve defined by those points" doesn't have a precise meaning. However, after gathering more information,
Are you a SAS Enterprise Guide user? If so, you are in luck. SAS Press author Neil Constable provides the inspiration for this week's SAS Author's tip. And this book is more than just a pretty face (the cover photographs very nicely). You'll find rich content from beginning to end.
I promised myself that I would not collect any take home books until Thursday. So much for promises! While walking through the BEA 2011 show floor there were titles that had my name on them. I can barely carry my bag. I visited some local reseller booths such as Duke
During his presentation at Book Expo 2011 (BEA) yesterday, Michael Norris, from Simba Information, declared "the print book will not die - you can write my name by that statement." Forty-eight percent of Americans did not buy a book last year. That is an audience we need to reach. New
SAS Enterprise Guide has about 150 options that you can customize in the Tools->Options window. With each release, the development team adds a few more options that have been asked for by customers, and they rarely decommission any existing options. It's getting quite crowded on some of those options windows!
Recently I had to compute the trace of a product of square matrices. That is, I had two large nxn matrices, A and B, and I needed to compute the quantity trace(A*B). Furthermore, I was going to compute this quantity thousands of times for various A and B as part
I spent my first day at Book Expo (BEA) at the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) conference. There were good presentations but the one that gave me an 'aha' moment was on e-reading devices presented by Gartner. Allen Weiner from Gartner prefaced his predictions by asking what customers need. They
SAS is the underwriter of a MeriTalk study released today that focuses on “The Federal Efficiency Opportunity”. The study uncovered meaningful insights into how federal managers and professionals are trying to meet their goals while facing enormous budget cuts. The study was done after President Obama’s Deficit Commission suggested in
Often-cited reasons for writing a book remind me of what detectives name as two factors necessary for committing a crime: motive and opportunity. I certainly had a strong motive for writing a book. I had been discussing knowledge sharing and running SAS knowledge flow initiatives for over a decade. Opportunity
The basic big data problem is simple to understand: we create too much data to store and analyze it all. The problem gets bigger, however, when you consider the related factors: our problems themselves are getting bigger, the analytics needed to solve them are more complex and the data is
Did you know that you can display a list of all the SAS/IML variables (matrices) that are defined in the current session? The SHOW statement performs this useful task. For example, the following statements define three matrices: proc iml; fruit = {"apple", "banana", "pear"}; k = 1:3; x = j(1E5,
This week's featured book comes from author A. John Bailer. We published John's book last summer and it continues to be one of our most popular titles. Following the tip below, you may want to visit John's SAS Talks on-demand webinar for some free training! The following excerpt is from
This week, SAS hosted the Financial Services Executive Summit at our headquarters in Cary, NC. Part of the content was a fascinating panel discussion moderated by Lori Bieda, the SAS Executive Lead for Customer Intelligence. In the picture below, Lori is on the left and she was joined on the
Have you ever wanted to look like George Clooney and get all the money, fame, and dates? I have long aspired to this. But in the great poker hand of life, I wasn't dealt an inside straight or even a nice pair. So I make do with what I've got.
Although midsize US banks do not need to follow the Basel II accord, some choose to. And as Hans Helbekkmo, Chief Risk Officer for San Francisco-based Union Bank, told guests at April’s SAS Global Forum Executive Conference, the decision to follow the Basel II requirements using a transparent, in-house approach
