I've supplied dozens of custom tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide, but the Copy Files task is easily the most popular. The Copy Files task allows you to capture "file transfer" steps inside your process flow, so that you can automate any file upload and download operations between your PC and
.@philsimon says don't treat data self-service as a binary.
Who was the oldest person elected president of the United States? How about the youngest? Who was the oldest when he left office? Let's look at some data. Wikipedia has a page that presents a table of the presidents of the US by age. It lists the dates for which
Meetings, emails, budgets, phone calls, more emails, a meeting that could be an email, an email that should be a meeting – sound familiar? This is a typical work week for most of us. It is easy to get caught up in the next thing on the calendar and lose
Does it seem like there just aren't enough daylight hours to get things done these days? It might not be that you've got more to do - it might be that we actually have fewer daylight hours in the winter (here in the northern hemisphere). And since "seeing is believing,"
If you obtain data from web sites, social media, or other unstandardized data sources, you might not know the form of dates in the data. For example, the US Independence Day might be represented as "04JUL1776", "07/04/1776", "Jul 4, 1776", or "July 4, 1776." Fortunately, the ANYDTDTE informat makes it
Brings relief to feet, legs and spine. Relaxes the nervous system and cultivates sleep. Legs Up the Wall (Sanskrit: Viparita Karani)
Retail isn't an easy place to be these days. The environment is omnichannel and ever-changing. Competition is rising and retailers are struggling to understand how to best meet customers’ merchandise preferences. Fortunately, analytics are driving profitability and market share for smart retailers. Let’s take a look at the four hottest
One of the most frequent questions I’m asked by my students is which business analytics books to read to support their professional self-development. It is always hard to pick out the best books, especially because I like to mix classics and domain-specific references. I particularly like those that influence business
The 2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting will be held at the Music City Center and Omni Nashville Hotel in downtown Nashville, TN on November 13-16, with pre-conference events starting on Saturday, November 12. SAS will be a major participant in this conference. Over two dozen people from SAS will attend, with
We often talk about full customer data visibility and the need for a “golden record” that provides a 360-degree view of the customer to enhance our customer-facing processes. The rationale is that by accumulating all the data about a customer (or, for that matter, any entity of interest) from multiple sources, you
The Data For Good initiative is all about using data and analytics to improve the lives of citizens around the world – however most people wouldn’t immediately think about tax collection as a humanitarian effort. But that’s exactly how Courtney Kay-Decker, Executive Director of the Iowa Department of Revenue sees
We all have challenges in getting an accurate and consistent view of our customers across multiple applications or sources of customer information. Suggestion-based matching is a technique found in SAS Data Quality to improve matching results for data that has arbitrary typos and incorrect spellings in it. The suggestion-based concept
In the US presidential election, each of the 50 states has a certain number of electoral votes, based on the population. Typically, most states cast all their electoral votes for the candidate who wins in their state (all or nothing). But states can split their electoral votes if they want
Just by looking at a plantain it’s easy to see that it’s a member of the banana family. Plantains are a very common food in tropical climates all over the world such as South America, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. While not quite as common in the U.S., they
This article uses graphical techniques to visualize one of my favorite geometric objects: the surface of a three-dimensional torus. Along the way, this article demonstrates techniques that are useful for visualizing more mundane 3-D point clouds that arise in statistical data analysis. Define points on a torus A torus is
Last week a user asked about BY variable group processing for SGAnnotate with SGPLOT procedure. The user provided a simple use case for the question (always a good idea) using the sashelp.class data set. The graph included a display of reference lines for the mean value of height using annotation. The
Most enterprises employ multiple analytical models in their business intelligence applications and decision-making processes. These analytical models include descriptive analytics that help the organization understand what has happened and what is happening now, predictive analytics that determine the probability of what will happen next, and prescriptive analytics that focus on
Rotation matrices are used in computer graphics and in statistical analyses. A rotation matrix is especially easy to implement in a matrix language such as the SAS Interactive Matrix Language (SAS/IML). This article shows how to implement three-dimensional rotation matrices and use them to rotate a 3-D point cloud. Define
Elections in the US are a 'target rich environment' for data analysts. There are surveys and forecasts before the election, and the presentation of results during and after the voting. What's your favorite election-related graph of all time? For the current (2016) presidential election, my favorite graphs are on the
The digital age has fundamentally changed how brands and organisations interact with consumers. This shift has been a crucial part of the Third Industrial Revolution and helped spark the era of consumers sharing their data with different organisations. But now organisations are heralding the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and data is
My river walk last week turned into a spectacular fall show. But if it rains this week in San Antonio, like the weatherman predicts, what will I do? In the coming days, I’ll be presenting at two user groups, one in eastern Canada in Halifax, and the other all the
After the financial crisis of 2008, concerns have been raised about “too little, too late” provisioning for loan losses and IFRS 9 is coming to enforce the adoption of a new expected credit loss (‘ECL’) model for the measurement and recognition of impairment. This aims to address concerns and accelerates
Electronic health records (EHRs) and the overall advancement of information technology have produced a tsunami of data that must be stored, managed and used. Some had naively hoped that EHRs would bring a simpler, more streamlined industry. Instead, we’re finding that the delivery and management of health care is more
Being an Eagle Scout, the data for good movement caught my attention. I wondered if I could apply my computer skills in a way that might help. How about showing people better ways to visualize HIV/AIDS data - that might help doctors better understand the data, and therefore better treat
Occasionally on a discussion forum, a statistical programmer will ask a question like the following: I am trying to fit a parametric distribution to my data. The sample has a long tail, so I have tried the lognormal, Weibull, and gamma distributions, but nothing seems to fit. Please help!! In
SAS Community member @tc (a.k.a. Ted Conway) has found a new toy: ODS Graphics. Using PROC SGPLOT and GTL (Graph Template Language), along with some creative data prep steps, Ted has created several fun examples that show off what you can do with a bit of creativity, some math knowledge,
With DataFlux Data Management 2.7, the major component of SAS Data Quality and other SAS Data Management solutions, every job has a REST API automatically created once moved to the Data Management Server. This is a great feature and enables us to easily call Data Management jobs from programming languages
One request came in for the previous article on Circle link graph, for the addition of arrow heads to indicate the direction of the flow. Given that I am using a SERIES plot to render the links, it is relatively easy to add arrow heads to the links as the SERIES
.@philsimon says that even seemingly useless information can be useful under the right circumstances.
