With Pi Day coming up on 3/14, I wanted to make sure all you SAS programmers know how to use the pi constant in your SAS code... All you have to do is use constant("pi") in a data step, and you've got the value of pi out to a good many decimal places
This blog is not about the original movie The More the Merrier (1943) or its remake, Walk, Don’t Run (1966), which I’ve actually seen a couple of times. It’s actually about the wide variety of descriptive statistics available in SAS Visual Analytics—and when you want to examine the characteristics of
England’s shambolic early exit from the Cricket World Cup has stirred up a hornet’s nest about the team’s supposed over-reliance on data. In the aftermath of their defeat to Bangladesh, coach Peter Moores said: ‘We thought 275 (runs) was chaseable. We’ll have to look at the data.’ It prompted outrage from
Are you heading to the ENAR 2015 Spring Meeting in Miami this week? SAS author and Program Chair Mithat Gönen, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Associate Chair Brisa Sánchez, of the University of Michigan School of Public Health have created an outstanding scientific program this year. The sessions cover
Saturday, March 14, 2015, is Pi Day, and this year is a super-special Pi Day! This is your once-in-a-lifetime chance to celebrate the first 10 digits of pi (π) by doing something special on 3/14/15 at 9:26:53. Apologies to my European friends, but Pi Day requires that you represent dates
Two popular SAS custom tasks have recently been updated for SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1. Most custom tasks that I've shared will work without modification across releases, but these two required a special rebuild due to some internal product API changes. The Project Reviewer task allows you to see a detail
The data lake is a great place to take a swim, but is the water clean? My colleague, Matthew Magne, compared big data to the Fire Swamp from The Princess Bride, and it can seem that foreboding. The questions we need to ask are: How was the data transformed and
The Internet of Things is coming fast and furious. We clearly know what these “things” are, and were able to see prototypes at last week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) which hosted some 93,000 attendees. Things = connected life = cars, homes (thermostats, washer and dryers, vacuum cleaners, security systems, refrigerators, etc.),
My colleague Charlie Chase, Advisory Industry Consultant and author of the book Demand-Driven Forecasting, has developed a new course for the SAS Business Knowledge Series (BKS): Best Practices in Demand-Driven Forecasting. The 2-day course will be offered for the first time April 20-21 in Atlanta (and then again September 24-25 in Chicago). From the
Innovation within hospitality drives awareness, service delivery, guest engagement, and brand differentiation. SAS asked a panel of experts to comment on how innovation is shaping the hospitality industry. According to many of our experts, analytics is at the heart of innovation. Learn more in this white paper on building
I just found out that Girl Scout cookies haven't changed from when I was a kid. I just moved to a different area, serviced by a different cookie maker! That's what I found out from the cool map in an article on latimes.com! The article explains that there are two different
Peg solitaire I love puzzles; I have a few of them in my office. I regularly use them at interviews: I ask the candidate either to solve a puzzle or to devise a (clever) mathematical algorithm that solves it. I'm sure a lot of readers are familiar with the standard
SAS FULLSTIMER is a SAS system option that takes operating system information that is being collected by SAS process runs and writes that information to the SAS log. Using it can add up to 10 lines additional lines to your SAS log for each SAS step in your SAS log—so why
Ole Man Winter has taken his sweet time getting out of here this year challenging even the most complacent weather watchers. But, last night I finally heard it - the beautiful trill of the Spring Peeper frogs. If you’re not from North Carolina or parts nearby, you may be unfamiliar
Sometimes I get contacted by SAS/IML programmers who discover that the SAS/IML language does not provide built-in support for multiplication of matrices that have missing values. (SAS/IML does support elementwise operations with missing values.) I usually respond by asking what they are trying to accomplish, because mathematically matrix multiplication with
The SG Procedures do not support creating a 3D scatter plot. GTL has some support for 3D graphs, including a 3D Bi-variate Histogram and a 3D Surface, but still no 3D point cloud. The lack of such a feature is not due to any difficulty in doing this as
Today in manufacturing there has been a lot of investment in automation, supervisory controls, quality, and execution systems. The amount of data produced and now being captured is staggering. The data captured in industry will re-define what is “big” in big data. Yet, for all this investment: Equipment still fails. Scrap
Beyond traditional clustering and predictive models lies social network analysis. It can help describe customers’ behaviors in new ways, but what exactly is it and how can businesses use it? To find out more, I interviewed Carlos Andre Reis Pinheiro. He’s been working in social network analysis around the world
In my last two posts, we concluded two things. First, because of the need for broadcasting data across the internal network to enable the complete execution of a JOIN query in Hadoop, there is a potential for performance degradation for JOINs on top of files distributed using HDFS. Second, there are
“When it comes to the Internet of Things, the future clearly belongs to the Things”. I made this brash statement in a previous post (“Cloud encounters of the Fifth Kind”) referring to machine-to-machine (M2M) being the fastest growing component of non-human traffic on the Web. I say “brash” because that
In my previous post, I talked about how a bank realized that data quality was central to some very basic elements of its initiatives, such as know your customer (KYC), customer on-boarding and others. In this blog, let’s explore what this organization did to foster an environment of data quality
I often blog about the usefulness of vectorization in the SAS/IML language. A one-sentence summary of vectorization is "execute a small number of statements that each analyze a lot of data." In general, for matrix languages (SAS/IML, MATLAB, R, ...) vectorization is more efficient than the alternative, which is to
For Parent’s Weekend this year, I needed to choose a restaurant for dinner in my son’s college town. Our extended family was attending the college football game and spending the weekend with our son. Before making my decision, I searched the internet for all the restaurants located within a reasonable
♦We learned this week that SAS is ranked #4 on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2015. This makes six straight years ranking in the top four (including twice at #1). ♦The March/April 2015 issue of Analytics Magazine includes a SAS company profile by my colleague Kathy Lange. As
You may be intrigued to know how the average person compares to a gold medal winning Olympic athlete when it comes to things like height, body mass, resting heart rate, arm span, body fat etc. Or, perhaps more frightening, how you measure up? I know this will resonate with my
Public educators have increasingly been told to produce the “workforce of the future.” States are striving for alignment between what students learn and the jobs that ultimately will be available to them. This alignment is critical for students so they have the right skills and knowledge to excel at college
In my previous post, I showed how to approximate a cumulative density function (CDF) by evaluating only the probability density function. The technique uses the trapezoidal rule of integration to approximate the CDF from the PDF. For common probability distributions, you can use the CDF function in Base SAS to
Does your forecast look like a radio? No? Then don't treat it like one. A radio's tuning knob serves a valid purpose. It lets you make fine adjustments, improving reception of the incoming signal, resulting in a clearer and more enjoyable listening experience. But just because you can make fine adjustments to
When I saw Robert Kosoro's cool ZIPScribble map, I knew I had to create a SAS version - and of course I had to add a few enhancements along the way.... I was perusing some of the examples on dadaviz.com, and Kosoro's ZIPScribble map caught my attention. It wasn't a particularly useful
One of the common traps I see data quality analysts falling into is measuring data quality in a uniform way across the entire data landscape. For example, you may have a transactional dataset that has hundreds of records with missing values or badly entered formats. In contrast, you may have
