Although I do not typically blog about undocumented SAS options, I'll make an exception this time. For many years, I have known that the CONTENTS and COMPARE procedures support the BRIEF and SHORT options, but I always forget which option goes with which procedure. For the record, here are the
Do you want to bin a numeric variable into a small number of discrete groups? This article compiles a dozen resources and examples related to binning a continuous variable. The examples show both equal-width binning and quantile binning. In addition to standard one-dimensional techniques, this article also discusses various techniques
Binning transforms a continuous numerical variable into a discrete variable with a small number of values. When you bin univariate data, you define cut point that define discrete groups. I've previously shown how to use PROC FORMAT in SAS to bin numerical variables and give each group a meaningful name
An informat helps you read data into a SAS data set. SAS supports more than 100 informats. The most common informats are related to dates and times and make it easy to read an input string such as 28JAN2001 and convert it to a SAS date such as 15003. Yet
A SAS programmer posted an interesting question on a SAS discussion forum. The programmer wanted to iterate over hundreds of SAS data sets, read in all the character variables, and then do some analysis. However, not every data set contains character variables, and SAS complains when you ask it to
Last year, I wrote more than 100 posts for The DO Loop blog. Of these, the most popular articles were about data visualization, SAS programming tips, and statistical data analysis. Here are the most popular articles from 2018 in each category. Data Visualization Visualize repetition in song lyrics: In one
You might know that you can use the ODS SELECT statement to display only some of the tables and graphs that are created by a SAS procedure. But did you know that you can use a WHERE clause on the ODS SELECT statement to display tables that match a pattern?
A useful feature in PROC SGPLOT is the ability to easily visualize subgroups of data. Most statements in the SGPLOT procedure support a GROUP= option that enables you to overlay plots of subgroups. When you use the GROUP= option, observations are assigned attributes (colors, line patterns, symbols, ...) that indicate
A programmer recently asked a question on a SAS discussion forum about design matrices for categorical variables. He had generated a design matrix by using PROC GLMMOD and wanted to use the design columns in a subsequent procedure. However, the columns were named COL1, COL2, COL3,..., so he couldn't tell
My 2018 SAS Global Forum paper was about "how to use the random-number generators (RNGs) in SAS." You can read the paper for details, but I recently recorded a short video that summarizes the main ideas in the paper. In particular, the video gives an overview of the new RNGs
