In a previous blog, I demonstrated a program and macro that could identify all numeric variables set to a specific value, such as 999. This blog discusses an immensely useful technique that allows you to perform an operation on all numeric or all character variables in a SAS data set.
Matthew Magne describes how SAS Data Quality can help you build a trusted data foundation, one stone at a time.
When I teach my Data Cleaning course, the last topic I cover in the two-day course is SAS Integrity Constraints. I find that most of the students, who are usually quite advanced programmers, have never heard of Integrity Constraints (abbreviated ICs). I decided a short discussion on this topic would
You can use a range attribute map to control the mapping of values in a continuous variable to colors. This post shows you how to use PROC SGPLOT to display multiple plots in the same graph and use range attribute maps.
The role of analytics in combating terrorism Earlier this spring, I found myself walking through a quiet and peaceful grove of spruce trees south of the small hamlet of Foy outside of Bastogne, Belgium. On travel in Europe, I happened to have some extra time before heading to London. I
The new government’s vision of Brexit is to make the UK a more international, more outward looking nation. One whose future success and status in on the world stage will be dictated by the ability to attract investment and finance, and to drive trade with existing and new partners. Yet
My presentation at SAS Global Forum 2017 was "More Than Matrices: SAS/IML Software Supports New Data Structures." The paper was published in the conference proceedings several months ago, but I recently recorded a short video that gives an overview of using the new data structures in SAS/IML 14.2: If your
To demonstrate the power of text mining and the insights it can uncover, I used SAS Text Mining technologies to extract the underlying key topics of the children's classic Alice in Wonderland. I want to show you what Alice in Wonderland can tell us about both human intelligence and artificial
A new book from SAS guides public sector leaders in the use of data to address a wide range of state and local government challenges. Each chapter deals with critical issues facing our country, including the opioid epidemic, child abuse, spiraling health care costs, prison overcrowding, education reform, rampant fraud and the
Dictionary tables are one of the things I love most about SQL! What a useful thing it is to be able to programmatically determine what your data looks like so you can write self-modifying and data-driven programs. While PROC SQL has a great set of dictionary tables, they all rely
Here in the US, we typically use top level domains such as .com, .gov, and .org. I guess we were one of the first countries to start using web domains in a big way, and therefore we kind of got squatter's rights. As other countries started using the web, they
A vector plot draws a line from one point in a graph to another point. In this post, I will show you how to create short vectors instead of vectors that emanate from the origin. I also show how to modify the positions of the vector labels.
Time is marching on, despite my best efforts to slow it down. Larkin graduated from Enloe High School last week, and leaves for Virginia Tech in August. I am filled with joy and despair, often simultaneously, laughing through my tears, trying desperately to enjoy every minute with him and yet
IT organizations today are constantly challenged to do more with less. Reusing data processing jobs and employing best practices in monitoring the health of your data are proven ways to improve the productivity of data professionals. Dataflux Data Management Studio is a component of both the SAS Data Quality and
David Loshin says simple approaches to identity resolution may not scale on a big data platform as data volumes increase.
Musings on Menopause and Fitness What the heck is happening to me??? I’m not sure if I’m happy or sad, freezing or on fire, coming or going, want to be healthy or eat an XL Papa Murphy pizza… Hormotional…Menopause… Like Mother Nature wasn’t cruel enough with menstruation, pregnancy, labor, delivery
One way to assess the precision of a statistic (a point estimate) is to compute the standard error, which is the standard deviation of the statistic's sampling distribution. A relatively large standard error indicates that the point estimate should be viewed with skepticism, either because the sample size is small
Reading quite a lot of the press and commentary about analytics, you could be forgiven for thinking that these techniques were only usable for customer-facing work. Improving sales and marketing? Yes, you want analytics, using Big Data about your customers. But there are plenty of internal and operational issues where
Today in higher education, savvy users expect to have the information they need to make data-informed decisions at their fingertips. As such, leaders in institutional research (IR) are under pressure to provide these users with accurate data, reports and analyses. IR has been tasked with transforming data and reports in
There have been several polarizing topics throughout history, such as religion & political affiliation. And for software developers there's one more biggie ... tabs -vs- spaces! Which group is right? Perhaps the opinion of the better programmers should have more weight(?) Is there a metric we can use to determine whether
A Stem and Leaf plot is a visual that can help quickly visualize the distribution of the data. This graph was particularly useful before the advent of modern statistical graphs including the Histogram and Box Plot. One nice feature of the plot is it shows the actual values in the
Following the UK General Election result where no political party secured a clear majority ahead of the Brexit negotiations, it’s fair to say there’s lots of uncertainty facing the UK government right now. This, and the more outward looking post-Brexit era we're facing, are just two reasons why I believe
Most numerical optimization routines require that the user provides an initial guess for the solution. I have previously described a method for choosing an initial guess for an optimization, which works well for low-dimensional optimization problems. Recently a SAS programmer asked how to find an initial guess when there are
It has been almost a year since then-U.S. CIO Tony Scott introduced the federal open source policy that called for agencies to share federally-developed software source code. The policy, more than anything, aimed to make agencies more agile. Instead of redeveloping the same programs the open source policy would allow
A frequently requested statistical graph is the scatter plot by with discrete categories along with mean value for each category. Searching for a "Scatter with Mean" will return a lot of requests for such a graph in SAS, Stata, R and other statistical software. Such a graph is very easy
Have you ever written a macro and wondered if there was an easy way to pass values to the macro? You can by using macro parameters. Macro parameters enable you to pass values into the macro at macro invocation, and set default values for macro variables within the macro definition.
If countries have a similar median age, does that mean they are also similar in other ways? My best guess at an answer is - probably. Perhaps if we plot the data on a map, we'll be able to see the answer more clearly. I first started thinking about this
Regulations, corporate drivers, leadership and market influences have combined to produce a patchwork of uneven progress on initiatives such as distributed generation, customer choice, asset optimization and the industrial Internet of Things. These initiatives all rely on analytics to gain the most return on investment. To better understand organizational readiness
In part 2, Jim Harris explains more about why you should address data quality and governance issues on the way to data lakes and Hadoop.
When I was in college, I lived in the Alexander dorm, where each room had an American student and an International student. I learned a lot about the rest of the world, and I also heard a lot of different languages being spoken. I'm really impressed when I hear people
