Ugh! Your favorite regression procedure just printed a warning to the SAS log. Something is wrong, and your attempt to fit a model to the data has not succeeded. A typical message is "WARNING: The validity of the model fit is questionable," perhaps followed by some additional diagnostic messages about
A family and its members represent a simple hierarchy. For example, the Jones family has four members: A text file might represent this hierarchy with family records followed by family members' records, like this: The PROC FORMAT step below defines the codes in Column 1: proc format; value $type
A few weeks back I saw a couple of posts on the Communities page from users wanting to find ways to compute the area of an general polygon and also the center of the area. I felt such features likely existed somewhere in the SAS/GRAPH set of procedures, so I asked our resident
Do you use an array of tools to perform predictive analytics on your data? Is your current tool not flexible enough to accommodate some of your requirements? SAS Enterprise Miner may be your solution. With growing number of data mining applications, having a tool which can do variety of analysis
In my last post, I noted that the flexibility provided by the concept of the schema-on-read paradigm that is typical of a data lake had to be tempered with the use of a metadata repository so that anyone wanting to use that data could figure out what was really in
One of my presentations at SAS Global Forum 2015 was titled "Ten Tips for Simulating Data with SAS". The paper was published in the conference proceedings several months ago, but I recently recorded a short video that gives an overview of the 10 tips: If your browser does not support
Our friends at the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting have announced their next free practitioner workshop. It will be held Wednesday October 7,1:00-5:15pm, at BMA House, Tavistock Square, London WC1H. This session's top is: Promotional Modelling and Forecasting Understanding and forecasting the effects of a promotion for both retailers and manufacturers
As a linguist, I am fascinated with words, their meanings and use. So when I recently saw the words “learning analytics” in a conference paper title, I started thinking about the prevalence of the word “analytics” itself. In the last decade, we have preceded “analytics” with many modifiers referring to
I recently saw an article on washingtonpost.com showing what methods are used to generate electricity in each state. The data was interesting enough that I decided to try my hand at graphing and mapping it with our SAS software. Read along to see what I kept the same, and what
So you think you can outsmart your statistical forecast? Apparently, lots of people do. In "Judgmental Adjustments to Forecasts in the New Economy" (Foresight, Issue 38 (Summer 2015), 31-36), Manzoor Chowdhury and Sonia Manzoor argue that forecasters are becoming more dependent on judgmental adjustments to a statistical forecast. Sometimes this
Our new book, Exercises and Projects for The Little SAS® Book Fifth Edition, includes a variety of exercises to help people learn SAS programming. Rebecca Ottesen, Lora Delwiche and I designed this book so that it can be used either in a classroom setting or by individual readers working alone.
SAS users often ask me about the best way to group or bin their data in preparation for additional analysis. Depending on the need, there are several ways to achieve this using SAS procedures or other SAS processing. Creating user-defined formats with PROC FORMAT or using Data step processing are
I wanna be an airborne ranger, Live the life of guts and danger.* If you are an 80's movie buff, you might remember the scene in The Breakfast Club where Bender, the juvenile delinquent played by Judd Nelson, distracts the principal by running through the school singing this song. Recently,
The intersection of data governance and analytics doesn’t seem to get discussed as often as its intersection with data management, where data governance provides the guiding principles and context-specific policies that frame the processes and procedures of data management. The reason for this is not, as some may want to
Everyone who codes with SAS knows what the SASWORK directory space is, and everyone who has ever managed a medium-large installation knows that you need to monitor this space to avoid a huge buildup of worthless disk usage. One of the most common snarls happens when large SAS jobs go
I've spent a great deal of time in my consulting career railing against multiple systems of record, data silos and disparate versions of the truth. In the mid-1990s, I realized that Excel could only do so much. To quickly identify and ultimately ameliorate thorny data issues, I had to up
Are you thinking about completing a fall race? Whether it’s a 5K, 10K, or half or full marathon, it’s going to be here before you know it. I’ve been running for years, and I can tell you, there’s nothing like the motivation of signing up for a race to get
Typically a correlation analysis reports the correlations between all pairs of variables, including the variables with themselves. The resulting correlation matrix is square, symmetric, and has 1s on the main diagonal. But suppose you are interested in only specific combinations of variables. Perhaps you want the pairwise correlations between one
In recent blog posts, we shared the benefits of participating in a SAS users group, how to register your group, and tips on how to find a group that meets your individual needs. But, what if you’ve discovered that there isn’t a local users group in your community or that
The Wall Street Journal recently published a study of the top 17 medical areas (or body parts) that venture capitalist investments are likely to benefit. They used graphs to summarize the results, but "the graph guy" in me just couldn't resist trying to improve them. Did my improvements help? -
In my local paper this morning, I read about how a North Carolina state commission plans to recommend changes to our teaching standards for mathematics. One of the topics that they want to bring back: Roman numerals. Why? According to my exhaustive 30 seconds of Internet research, the only practical
SAS is hosting this year’s European Analytics 2015 conference in Rome November 9 – 11. This three-day inspiring event will give you the chance to boost your company’s analytics culture in an international environment to make sure your knowledge and expertise meet the demands of the digital era. But what if
Now that another summer of 12-hour family road-trips to Maine and Ohio, pricey engineering and basketball camps for the kids, and beating the heat at the beach are over, I've taken a fresh look at what people are focused on with their data – and what SAS is providing in the data management space.
In the past few weeks, I have written two posts on SG annotation and on saving and then modifying the graphs that analytical procedures produce: Modifying dynamic variables in ODS Graphics Annotating graphs from analytical PROCs Today, I finish this series with one more post. This one shows how you
When SAS 9.4m3 was released last month (including SAS/STAT and SAS/IML 14.1), I was happy to see that a HEATMAP statement had been added to the SGPLOT procedure. Although heat maps in the SAS/IML language have been available for several releases, you previously had to use the Graph Template Language
Today’s Medicaid environment is drastically different from that 5, 10 or 20 years ago. Medicaid enrollment has grown to monumental heights with recent CMS numbers (April 2015) at over 70 million. As enrollment rises, concerns about efficient management of care access, cost, quality, and effectiveness have become even more prominent.
“Garbage in, garbage out” is more than a catchphrase – it’s the unfortunate reality in many analytics initiatives. For most analytical applications, the biggest problem lies not in the predictive modeling, but in gathering and preparing data for analysis. When the analytics seems to be underperforming, the problem almost invariably
If you know me, you know two undeniable things (other than my love for froyo): I consider shopping a sport and I am an Analytics geek. Being an Analytics geek means that I see potential for using data everywhere, and never more than when it’s my data as a customer.
The new 7.3 release of SAS Visual Analytics not only uses the new HTML5 home page as the entry point to the Visual Analytics environment, but also introduces the new HTML5 viewer. The HTML5 home page interface features a personalized welcome message, tiles for content organization (Recent, Links, Favorites), icons to access
When we first released GTL and SG Procedures back with SAS 9.2, Box Plots and Bar Charts would always treat the category axis as discrete. We realized soon enough that we need to support box plots on scaled interval axes for many clinical applications, and this was added in SAS
