Last time I checked, there are well over 500 functions and call routines in SAS. I’ve taught SAS programming courses for 15 years, and I’ll admit that occasionally my students will ask me about a particular function that I have honestly never heard of. I remember the first time this
In my last post, we explored the operational facet of data governance and data stewardship. We focused on the challenges of providing a scalable way to assess incoming data sources, identify data quality rules and define enforceable data quality policies. As the number of acquired data sources increases, it becomes
I started young. Since I was 9 years old, I’ve always loved cooking delicious, tasty and healthy food, and feeding friends and family. My aunt still remembers the delicious chocolate soufflé that trembled and shook but would never collapse that I made for them when I was 18! Word spread.
In a previous blog post I explained how end users should code and use shared locations for SAS artifacts, to avoid issues in a SAS Grid Manager environment. Still, they could still fall in some sharing issues, which could have very obscure manifestations. For example, users opening SAS studio might notice
Although statisticians often assume normally distributed errors, there are important processes for which the error distribution has a heavy tail. A well-known heavy-tailed distribution is the t distribution, but the t distribution is unsuitable for some applications because it does not have finite moments (means, variance,...) for small parameter values.
I started out as a Psychology major. During my third year as an undergraduate, I was hired on as a research assistant for my advisor in her cognitive psychology lab. Through this and progressively more complicated psychological research experience, I quickly grew to love statistics. By the end of that
Data science may be a difficult term to define, but data scientists are definitely in great demand! Wayne Thompson, Senior Product Manager at SAS, defines data science as a broad field that entails applying domain knowledge and machine learning to extract insights from complex and often dark data. To further
When shopping for a new TV, with many sets next to each other across a store wall, it is easy to compare the picture quality and brightness. What is not immediately evident and expected is the difference between how the set looked in the store and how it looks in your
I am more than glad to invite you to join me in a series of posts related to a practical guide for tackling auto insurance fraud in the new era of data science and advanced analytics. Insurers are used to face a constant threat, a powerful enemy that never rests.
As I've previously written, data analytics historically analyzed data after it stopped moving and was stored, often in a data warehouse. But in the era of big data, data needs to be continuously analyzed while it’s still in motion – that is, while it’s streaming. This allows for capturing the real-time value of data
Last week, one of the major pipelines supplying gasoline to the eastern US broke. Do you know where the break is, and which states will be having shortages? Me neither! ... So, of course, I created a SAS map to help... First I read up about the spill on various
Wheat rust. You may have never heard of it, but in a matter of days, this fast-moving, silent-killing plant disease can completely annihilate a critical wheat farm in Ethiopia. Wheat rust’s newest nemeses? A legion of volunteer superheroes in the Data for Good movement. When Jake Porway, Founder and Executive
Analytics Experience 2016 featured more than 100 breakout sessions and talks covering numerous topics in big data. You can watch many of those talks from our Analytics Experience 2016 video portal, where select keynote and session talks are archived. To give you a taste of the content you'll find there, here’s a
Last week I showed how to compute nearest-neighbor distances for a set of numerical observations. Nearest-neighbor distances are used in many statistical computations, including the analysis of spatial point patterns. This article describes how the distribution of nearest-neighbor distances can help you determine whether spatial data are uniformly distributed or
I've created several hundred SAS graphs over the years. I was just musing to myself this morning how nicely Google lets me peruse through images of my graphs. And I thought some of you might also like to know how to do that... Most of you know how to search for keywords
If you use SAS® software to create a report that contains multiple graphs, you know that each graph appears on a separate page by default. But now you want to really impress your audience by putting multiple graphs on a page. Keep reading because this blog post describes how to
.@philsimon on the need to adopt agile methodologies for data prep and analytics.
The SAS Quality Knowledge Base (QKB) is a collection of files which store data and logic that define data cleansing operations such as parsing, standardization, and generating match codes to facilitate fuzzy matching. Various SAS software products reference the QKB when performing data quality operations on your data. One of
Historically, generations could expect to experience one – maybe at best – major technology disruption or transformation in their lifetime. That’s simply not the case today. Today it is more difficult than ever before to know what will transform the technology landscape in the next month or the next year.
I’m a productivity junkie! Living in a culture where productivity is highly valued, cutting corners on sleep is often a life survival skill. We’ve been trained to function this way (at least in the US) for over 50 years. As a result, being tired and fatigued is the status quo
“What we are experiencing from analytics today is nothing short of a revolution,” said CEO Jim Goodnight, who spoke at Analytics Experience 2016 and set the stage for the conference’s executive panel. “Right now, my primary mission is to ensure people understand the limitless possibilities that lie before us, given
In Part 1 of this two-part series, I defined data preparation and data wrangling, then raised some questions about requirements gathering in a governed environment (i.e., ODS and/or data warehouse). Now – all of us very-managed people are looking at the horizon, and we see the data lake. How do
I jumped down the rabbit hole of essential oils (EOs) and aromatherapy ~18 years ago and never looked back. Smell is one of the strongest connections we have to memory. My first experience with essential oil occurred during a massage when the therapist used Lilac. I immediately thought of my
Oh, man! What's happening? I just can't figure out what's going on. I'm tired. Exhausted actually. I don't feel well. I just want my energy back! We've all been there. Sometimes more often that we'd like. Sounds like it's time for a reboot. How do we reboot the human body?
In this post, I will show you how to control the order of the entries in a legend and explicitly control the correspondence between groups and style elements in PROC SGPLOT. In many cases, the colors that are used to differentiate groups do not matter--the graph simply needs to display
Who says machine learning can't be fun? A crew of us from SAS went to San Francisco for the recent KDD conference, which bills itself as "a premier interdisciplinary conference, [which]brings together researchers and practitioners from data science, data mining, knowledge discovery, large-scale data analytics, and big data." We brought
SAS releases regular updates to software products in the form of hot fixes and maintenance releases. Hot fixes are SAS' timely response to customer-reported problems, as well as a way to deliver occasional security-related updates that can affect any software product. At SAS we call them "hot fixes." Other companies
You've seen the QR codes that you can just scan in with your smartphone's camera, rather than writing down a web URL or other information, right? But do you know how to create your own QR code? Here's an easy way to create them, using SAS... You're probably familiar with
Data governance can encompass a wide spectrum of practices, many of which are focused on the development, documentation, approval and deployment of policies associated with data management and utilization. I distinguish the facet of “operational” data governance from the fully encompassed practice to specifically focus on the operational tasks for
The IT industry is littered with examples of short-lived corporate partnerships and alliances that often appear impressive but regularly end or are withdrawn after the initial enthusiasm wanes. The old adage that “actions speaker louder than words” is especially pertinent and I regularly encourage clients to look for tangible examples
