The SGPLOT procedure (as well as other ODS Graphics procedures) does a great job of creating nice- looking output with very little coding. However, there are times when you want to make adjustments to the output's appearance. For those occasions, we have an ATTRS for that! The statements in PROC
The intelligence community needs to revamp its approach to analytics -- and that means creating an analytics strategy that will change the status quo. The challenges facing analysts are consistent throughout the strategic, operational and tactical levels of intelligence operations. The intelligence cycle (see diagram below) is a great teaching
Editor's note: Tiffany Carpenter, Head of Customer Intelligence, SAS UK & Ireland sizes up the benefits of the two technologies and offers up a solution to businesses wanting the best of both. With constant pressure on profit margins, organisations need to strike a balance between improving cost efficiencies and customer
“War is 90% information”, said Napoleon Bonaparte. Though the famous French general didn’t live in the information age, he attributed most of his military achievements to having the right information. Today’s business is similar - more and more companies are looking for a competitive advantage in data, more precisely useful
You might not know it by looking at me (I’m rounding up when I tell people I’m 5’8”) but I’m a huge basketball fan. I’ve been following the sport since I was 10, coaching it for the last decade and playing on teams throughout my life, still dedicating my winters
Everyone has a marketing attribution problem, and all attribution measurement methods are wrong. We hear that all the time. Like many urban myths, it is founded in truth. Most organizations believe they can do better on attribution. They all understand that there are gaps, for example, missing touchpoint data, multiple
The government has an unfathomable amount of data -- and it grows more and more each year. This puts agencies in a unique and important position to use that data for good. Whether it be improving government operations, solving some of the nation’s biggest challenges or empowering citizens in new
If you have recently had a baby you’ve likely heard of baby led weaning (BLW). The concept has been around for centuries, but it has become much more popular in the last few years. Baby led weaning is one way to start solids. Basically, it means that baby is allowed
This article shows how to simulate data from a mixture of multivariate normal distributions, which is also called a Gaussian mixture. You can use this simulation to generate clustered data. The adjacent graph shows three clusters, each simulated from a four-dimensional normal distribution. Each cluster has its own within-cluster covariance,
This is the final post in my series of machine learning best practices. If you missed the earlier posts, start at the beginning, or read the whole series by clicking on the image to the right. While post four in the series was about combining different types of models, this
Every fall, highways, backroads and neighborhood streets nationwide take on a noticeable yellow hue, as school buses carefully and methodically transport students back to school. In some areas, including Boston, this massive transportation exercise can present a number of challenges. Boston Public Schools (BPS) provided transportation for 25,000 students via
With Hurricane Irma recently pummeling pretty much the entire state of Florida, I got to wondering where past hurricanes have hit the state. Let's get some data, and figure out how to best analyze it using SAS software! I did a bit of web searching, and found the following map
Phil Simon weighs in on the value of getting your own hands dirty using self-service data prep.
If you’ve got SAS running within your organization, which is likely considering that over 90 percent of the largest global firms have SAS, you’ve probably been hearing a lot about SAS® Viya™, which drives many of the latest enhancements of the SAS platform. But amidst all the talk about microservices
A simple problem has long prevented students from revising their papers to correct mistakes with relative clauses: they can’t identify those clauses. Writing Reviser eliminates that problem. We highlight all the relative pronouns in an essay and present arrows pointing toward the word to which it relates. Students simply follow
Did you know that you can get SAS to compute symbolic (analytical) derivatives of simple functions, including applying the product rule, quotient rule, and chain rule? SAS can form the symbolic derivatives of single-variable functions and partial derivatives of multivariable functions. Furthermore, the derivatives are output in a form that
Bar charts in SGPLOT procedure have some new features that everyone may not be familiar with. In this article we will create bar charts with color response on linear axes. Normally, the VBAR statement treats the x-axis as discrete, placing each unique value by itself, equally spaced on the x-axis.
Stretches torso and arm & strengthens ankles, knees, legs, abdomen, buttocks and spine; Cultivates balance, opens chest and shoulders Balancing Half Moon (Sanskrit: Ardha Chandrasana)
It's time to share another tip about working with ZIP files in SAS. Since I first wrote about FILENAME ZIP to list and extract files from a ZIP archive, readers have been asking for more. Specifically, they want additional details about the files that are contained in a ZIP, including
As Hurricane Irma makes its way through the Caribbean, and heads towards the United States, the big question on everyone's mind ... is the hurricane going to hit my city? Or, as some people like to say, "should I buy milk & bread?" Let's analyze & map some data to
In SAS Visual Analytics 8.1, report creators have the ability to include drive-distance and drive-time in their geographical maps, but only if their site has an Esri ArcGIS Online account and they have valid credentials for the account. In the user Settings for SAS Visual Analytics Geographic Mapping 8.1 release,
Too often beginning writers revise their work without a clear sense of purpose. Sadly, that often results in a paper that becomes different rather than better, a process akin to someone blindly twisting and re-twisting a Rubik’s cube, uniformed by a larger strategy. The process can be painful to watch.
I suppose we've all been watching Hurricane Irma rip through the Caribbean like a giant buzzsaw blade, with wind speeds over 180mph. This is one of those rare Category 5 storms. But just how rare are Category 5 hurricanes? According to the Wikipedia page, hurricanes with wind speeds >=157mph are
If you use SAS regression procedures, you are probably familiar with the "stars and bars" notation, which enables you to construct interaction effects in regression models. Although you can construct many regression models by using that classical notation, a friend recently reminded me that the EFFECT statement in SAS provides
One of the easiest ways to lose a reader is to write a series of sentences with the exact same structure: “See Spot run. Watch him jump. Pet his head.” Compare that juvenile effect to one in which the student purposefully varies her sentence lengths: “Sitting in an expensive restaurant,
“Prefer active voice” may be the single most frequently dispensed injunction to improve writing. Strunk and White, George Orwell, and all student handbooks of the past 50 years extol the virtue of active verbs. But two problems often go unremarked: Students cannot reliably identify passive constructions in their own work.
When it comes to the SAS web experience on sas.com, support.sas.com (and more), we have a vision and mission to create experiences that connect people to the things that matter – quickly, easily and enjoyably. You could say that we’re a user-task-focused bunch of web people here, and so whether
Open the Statistics feature in the free Writing Reviser Google Doc Add-on, and you’ll see an elaborate but easy-to-read analysis of your entire essay. It’s the writerly equivalent of a blood test report, except that instead of listing your cholesterol level and lipid profile, we diagnose statistics crucial to the revision process.
This is the seventh post in my series of machine best practices. Catch up by reading the first post or the whole series now. Generalization is the learned model’s ability to fit well to new, unseen data instead of the data it was trained on. Overfitting refers to a model that fits
The buzz about "maker" spaces has reached epidemic proportions. Schools everywhere are repurposing extra classrooms, renovating computer labs, retooling media centers, and rehabbing teacher lounges to accommodate creative workstations, materials, and tools. That’s fantastic. But what if the school doesn’t have an extra room? Or has an anemic budget? What
