SAS formats are flexible, dynamic, and have many uses. For example, you can use formats to count missing values and to change the order of a categorical variable in a table or plot. Did you know that you can also use SAS formats to recode a variable or to bin
My presentation at SAS Global Forum 2016 was titled "Writing Packages: A New Way to Distribute and Use SAS/IML Programs." The paper was published in the conference proceedings several months ago, but I recently recorded a short video that gives an overview of using and creating packages in SAS/IML 14.1:
In a scatter plot, the regions where observations are packed tightly are areas of high density. A contour plot or heat map of a bivariate kernel density estimate (KDE) is one way to visualize regions of high density. A SAS customer asked whether it is possible to use SAS to
This week Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be nominated for president of the US by a major political party. Although this is a first for the US, many other countries have already passed this milestone. In fact, 60 countries have already elected women as presidents and prime ministers.
A kernel density estimate (KDE) is a nonparametric estimate for the density of a data sample. A KDE can help an analyst determine how to model the data: Does the KDE look like a normal curve? Like a mixture of normals? Is there evidence of outliers in the data? In
Last week I read an interesting paper by Bob Rodriguez: "Statistical Model Building for Large, Complex Data: Five New Directions in SAS/STAT Software." In it, Rodriguez summarizes five modern techniques for building predictive models and highlights recent SAS/STAT procedures that implement those techniques. The paper discusses the following high-performance (HP)
I'm addicted to you. You're a hard habit to break. Such a hard habit to break. — Chicago, "Hard Habit To Break" Habits are hard to break. For more than 20 years I've been putting semicolons at the end of programming statements in SAS, C/C++, and Java/Javascript. But lately I've been
One of my favorite new features in PROC SGPLOT in SAS 9.4m2 is addition of the COLORRESPONSE= and COLORMODEL= options to the SCATTER statement. By using these options, it is easy to color markers in a scatter plot so that the colors indicate the values of a continuous third variable.
Last week I showed how to represent a Markov transition matrix in the SAS/IML matrix language. I also showed how to use matrix multiplication to iterate a state vector, thereby producing a discrete-time forecast of the state of the Markov chain system. This article shows that the expected behavior of
Two of my favorite string-manipulation functions in the SAS DATA step are the COUNTW function and the SCAN function. The COUNTW function counts the number of words in a long string of text. Here "word" means a substring that is delimited by special characters, such as a space character, a
