A recent question posted on a discussion forum discussed storing the strictly upper-triangular portion of a correlation matrix. Suppose that you have a correlation matrix like the following: proc iml; corr = {1.0 0.6 0.5 0.4, 0.6 1.0 0.3 0.2, 0.5 0.3 1.0 0.1, 0.4 0.2 0.1 1.0}; Every correlation
Pink and blue. These colors are often synonymous with gender. In fact, when I was pregnant 16 years ago, we had no idea of our baby’s sex. At the shower, we received lots of blue, green and yellow clothing, but no pink. It’s interesting how blue can represent both male
All of us in the retail and wholesale industry, regardless of role, are responsible for the same objectives: Increase customer satisfaction, inventory productivity, and profitability by way of localization and omni strategies. We've learned that our best strategies sometimes fall short; we spend significant effort analyzing, only to achieve marginal results. Many of
All axis customization features are always welcome. Especially since SGPLOT statements can often be used to create non standard graphs, having the ability to customize the axes is important. This article presents ways in which you can customize the discrete axes. By default, the x axis will try to display the
No one knows for sure who coined the term Big Data. Despite etymological studies, we are still no closer to attributing provenance to any one person, or indeed any one period. Some say the term was coined in the '80s, others believe the '90s – and many are convinced the term originated
A coworker was recently in need of some simple graphics to include in a slide show to accompany her SAS Global Forum paper. After listening to what she wanted, I decided that I could use PROC SGPLOT to create those images for her. The first image was a set of stacked
Creating a grocery shopping list can be overwhelming for a variety of reasons. Lack of experience, picky eaters, and new recipes can turn an ambitious cook into an overwhelmed procrastinator. In this blog post I’ll show you an easy SAS Enterprise Guide project that uses prompts to create a simple
More and more of my friends seem to be eating less and less meat, for various reasons (such as religious, health, social conscience, weight loss, personal preference, cost savings, etc). So I thought I would put together a graph to help them find alternate sources of protein. While searching for
In today’s brave new technological world, most of us live cocooned in thermo-regulated cars and buildings. Our food and drink is on tap, and we experience little inconvenience beyond death and taxes. It’s easy to forget that life as we know it would come to an abrupt halt without the
The Internet of Things, that glorious futurescape in which billions of connected devices take much of the work and tedium out of daily living. As human beings, we’re addicted to our stuff and what it does for us. So a world in which most of our cell phones and other
Jim Harris discusses perspectives on the question of how much quality big data really needs.
Sizing is a topic that solutions managers typically leave until the end after decisions about the application have been settled. But there are often many variables that can impact the final size requirement. We have seen across our customer base that sizing and the number of environments has been determined
When modeling and simulating data, it is important to be able to articulate the real-life statistical process that generates the data. Suppose a friend says to you, "I want to simulate two random correlated variables, X and Y." Usually this means that he wants data generated from a multivariate distribution,
Have you been in your attic lately? Or maybe cleaned out that closet that all of your “stuff” seems to gravitate to? Sure, mostly you’ll just find old junk that is no longer useful or purely nostalgic, but every once in a while you come across those long lost treasures
So you think you know how to forecast? Now is your chance to prove it, by participating in a probabilistic load forecasting competition run by my friend (and former SAS colleague), Dr. Tao Hong. Currently a professor at UNC Charlotte and director of the Big Data Energy Analytics Laboratory (BigDEAL),
In a previous post, I discussed using discrete-event simulation to validate an optimization model and its underlying assumptions. A similar approach can be used to validate queueing models as well. And when it is found that the assumptions required for a queueing model are not a good fit for the
Editor’s Note: Regular registration for SCSUG 2015 closes on October 19th, though on-site registration will be available on conference days. Can’t make this year’s conference? Proceedings from previous conferences are currently available. Presentations from 2015 will become available shortly after the conference. For most people, the day before Halloween means
Big data, by which most people mean Big Volume, doesn’t get you very far just by itself, but with the addition of Big Variety and analytics, now you’re talking. In fact, most organizations who are making headway into capitalizing on their data assets now refer to the process as "big
Rick Wicklin created a nice example of using the SURFACEPLOTPARM statement to create a surface plot in SAS. As I read it, the question that immediately came to mind was: can I use this to create the famous SAS cowboy hat? The "cowboy hat" is a highly distributed example of
This article shows how to visualize a surface in SAS. You can use the SURFACEPLOTPARM statement in the Graph Template Language (GTL) to create a surface plot. But don't worry, you don't need to know anything about GTL: just copy the code in this article and replace the names of
The #1 rule of any self-respecting hipster is to not claim to be a hipster. Therefore, can there even be such a thing as a hipster beard, or hipster beard data? I contemplated this perplexing question, as I stroked my pirate beard. Since fashion trends tend to be cyclical, perhaps
with Natalie Osborn, Senior Industry Consultant, Hospitality and Gaming Practice, SAS We’ve taught analytics 101 through the last couple of blog posts, and now that you have passed that course, you are ready to take an advanced course in analytics. Ok, not really, we won’t subject you to that, but
Gartner has stated that there are nearly five billion connected devices throughout the world today and predicts that there will be more than 25 billion by 2020, making the potential of this technology unlimited. The connected devices in industrial settings, in personal devices, and in our homes are creating a
There are many ways to do data integration. Those include: Extract, transform and load (ETL) – which moves and transforms data (with some redundancy) from a source to a target. While ETL can be implemented (somewhat) in real time, it is usually executed at intervals (15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1
The Midwest SAS Users Group (MWSUG) 2015 conference is almost here and there’s a lot to get excited about. The event takes place October 18-20 in Omaha, NE. If you haven’t already registered, regular registration has been extended through October 13th. The full conference agenda is now available. We hope
This guest blog post comes from Dr. David Dickey, one of our original SAS Press authors. Hope you enjoy! In the late 1970s, shortly after SAS was founded, I was approached by Herbert Kirk and John Brocklebank from SAS to put together a course on time series. This was reasonably
The SAS In-Database Embedded Process is the key technology which enables the SAS® Scoring Accelerator, SAS® Code Accelerator, and SAS® Data Quality Accelerator products to function. The EP is the computation engine we place near the data, which reduces unnecessary data movement and speeds up processing and efficiency. The EP
Jim Harris addresses some of the most common questions and challenges big data poses for data quality.
In my last blog, I demonstrated how to configure a SAS server to write a record to a log file showing who is opening, editing or renaming a SAS table. In this blog we will see how we can process that information. The documentation shows one way to do this via
“Everywhere modern processed foods go, chronic diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease soon follow.” -Kris Gunnars The typical American diet is inundated with highly processed carbohydrates. We have a bagel made from white flour and sugar for breakfast, a sandwich on white bread for lunch, potato chips
