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
There's a lot of buzz about Hadoop these days. I started checking into it, and there seemed to be a gazillion releases. So, being The Graph Guy, I decided to create a graph to make it a little easier to digest! During my search for Hadoop information, I found the
A few of our clients are exploring the use of a data lake as both a landing pad and a repository for collection of enterprise data sets. However, after probing a little bit about what they expected to do with this data lake, I found that the simple use of
Choosing nutrient-dense foods is only half the battle when it comes to eating right. The other half is making sure you’re getting the most benefits from your great food choices. How do you do that, you ask? The answer is pretty simple. Paying attention to a few common food prep
Last month I wrote about how to simulate a drunkard's walk in SAS for a drunkard who can move only left or right in one direction. A reader asked whether the problem could be generalized to two dimensions. Yes! This article shows how to simulate a 2-D drunkard's walk, also
There's big money in professional sports these days - we're talking billions of dollars! Do you know which teams are the most valuable? The graphs in this blog will show you... I recently saw a bar chart on dadaviz.com showing the world's most valuable sports teams. It was the right kind
The SASIOLA libname engine is now delivered with most SAS software orders so that we can load LASR environments remotely from separate SAS environments. For example, maybe you have an existing SAS “ETL” machine that you use to access your source environments and load your target environments. With the SASIOLA
Krystian Matusz is what I’d call a super SAS user. He currently holds seven out of the nine credentials SAS offers. SAS Certified Advanced Programmer for SAS 9 SAS Certified Base Programmer for SAS 9 SAS Certified BI Content Developer for SAS 9 SAS Certified Clinical Trials Programmer Using SAS
While I've often written about how to get your SAS data to Microsoft Excel in some automated way, I haven't really addressed what's probably the most frequently used method: copy and paste. SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1 added a nifty little feature that makes copy-and-paste even more useful. The new "Copy
Many people who plan data governance initiatives ignore the need for a business case. "We've already had approval for the project; why do we need a business case when we've got the budget signed off?" The perception is that because they have a strong commitment, there is no need to get
There are many ways to modify the graphs that SAS creates. Standard graph customization methods include template modification (which most people use to modify graphs that analytical procedures produce) and SG annotation (which most people use to modify graphs that procedures such as PROC SGPLOT produce). However, you can also
When using SAS to format a number as a percentage, there is a little trick that you need to remember: the width of the formatted value must include room for the decimal point, the percent sign, and the possibility of two parentheses that indicate negative values. The field width must
Right now I’m crossing the Pacific toward Australia and New Zealand for the 21st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (a.k.a. KDD), a Data Science Melbourne MeetUp, and the SAS Users of New Zealand conference. New Zealand is the birthplace of open source R. So this trip
