There are many ways to use SAS in Health & Life Sciences, and one of my favorite is using it to track the spread of diseases. This post demonstrates how to layer several customized maps to track the recent Ebola outbreak in Africa. In this blog post, I describe how I
It is estimated that a typical organization loses 5% of its revenues to fraud each year (www.acfe.com). The total cost of insurance fraud (non-health insurance) in the US is estimated to be more than $40 billion per year (www.fbi.gov). The advent of Big Data & Analytics has provided new and
Wisdom has built her house; She has hewn out her seven pillars. – Proverbs 9:1 At the 2014 Joint Statistical Meetings in Boston, Stephen Stigler gave the ASA President's Invited Address. In forty short minutes, Stigler laid out his response to the age-old question "What is statistics?" His answer was
You may have heard the phase that big data is the new oil. Well (pun intended), if that is the case, then analytics should be thought of as the fracking technique used on data to improve the value you get from this new oil. Fracking is actually just one
You are the new SAS Administrator. After the initial shock or excitement, you sit back and wonder, “What does that MEAN???” In an enterprise environment there are often divisions of duties. The SAS Intelligence Platform is no exception. Just take a look at the architecture. Just looking at this picture,
In SAS software, you can use the QUAD subroutine in the SAS/IML language to evaluate definite integrals on an interval [a, b]. The integral is properly defined only for a < b, but mathematicians define the following convention, which enables you to make sense of reversing the limits of integration:
This article is by guest contributor Lelia McConnell, SAS Tech Support. Several users have called recently to ask the question, “Can I reorder the legend entries on the bar chart that I created with PROC SPLOT?” Although there is no option that does this directly in PROC SGPLOT, the answer
For those of you who are classic rock fans, you may remember Alice Cooper’s title track “School’s Out for Summer” on the album “School’s Out.” That song captures students’ excitement of a taking a hiatus from the classroom. But for professors, summer is a time to continue their own education
With Discovery Channel's Shark Week starting on August 10, I decided to sink my teeth into some shark-attack data - I even found there were some shark attacks in the Midwestern US! Read on to learn the details... To get you into the shark mindset, here is a photo of an
In July, we trained our 1 millionth user. It’s a significant milestone for SAS. In celebration, we want to recognize our customers and say “thank you” for making a commitment to us for your learning. Now through Aug. 31, we are offering a special Buy One, Get One 50-percent off
We often hear from retail bank customers that they aren't satisfied with the revenue captured through digital channels. It was therefore with great interest that I embarked on the mission to understand Chris Skinner’s book Digital Bank. Why we need digital banks The book starts by painting the landscape of
I spend a lot of time on support.sas.com looking for resources to share. The SAS Programmer’s Bookshelf is a handy reference that’s been around for a while, so I asked “Why not a SAS Administrator’s Bookshelf?” What would you include? It’s complicated, of course, because the SAS administrator’s role covers
A few years ago I discussed the idea of analytic resources as ‘all-stars’ rather than ‘rock stars.’ While this previous blog certainly touched on the team aspect of analytic work, recently I’ve been thinking about just how much teamwork is required to make an analytics project successful. From extracting data,
Unless you diligently read the "What's New" chapter for each release of SAS software, it is easy to miss new features that appear in the language. People who have been writing SAS/IML programs for decades are sometimes surprised when I tell them about a useful new function or programming feature.
Perhaps you're a big data expert who is fluent in Pig, Hive, MapR and all the technologies associated with the open source big data framework. Or maybe your role hasn't yet been touched by the increasingly popular Hadoop system. It's certainly worth a few minutes of your time (or perhaps
Sun, surf and SAS await you at this year’s South East SAS Users Group (SESUG) conference. Located at the beautiful Myrtle Beach, South Carolina from October 19-21, the conference offers two full days of learning, networking and problem-solving. “Every year I’ve attended, I’ve found something that I could immediately use
We’re not sure about you, but we just had the most thrilling, suspenseful, and fun month we’ve had in a while. The 2014 FIFA World Cup may be over, but we’re still amazed by not only the game outcomes and level of athleticism, but also by the wealth of interesting
In a previous blog post, I described how to generate combinations in SAS by using the ALLCOMB function in SAS/IML software. The ALLCOMB function in Base SAS is the equivalent function for DATA step programmers. Recall that a combination is a unique arrangement of k elements chosen from a set
A couple of days back, Rick Wicklin forwarded me a link to an article on the BadHessian Blog on creating a Bar Chart using six different freeware packages in R, Python and Julia. The target bar chart was one produced by the Jetpack stat module with WordPress. The graph is shown below. The unique feature of
SAS In-Memory Statistics for Hadoop is a single interactive programming environment for analytics on Hadoop that integrates analytical data preparation, exploration, modeling and deployment. It’s principle components are the IMSTAT procedure (PROC IMSTAT) and the SAS LASR Analytic Engine (or SASIOLA engine for input-output with LASR). Within the SAS In-Memory Statistics
How you flavor your foods can have huge impact on your health. Many of the spices we use to enhance our foods have powerful medicinal benefits like turmeric and ginger. Cinnamon also has amazing benefits and a lot of research behind it.
In this blog post, I put some classic rock song data under the SAS Analytics microscope, to see if I could get a better picture of exactly what is considered 'classic rock' these days... Michael Raithel recently pointed me to an interesting article/study about 'classic rock' music, and invited (or is
➤ DISCLOSURE! In June 2018 Google introduced changes to the way it handles its Maps platform. They now require API key in order to embed a map, plus Google Maps "projects" must now be associated with a billing account. Unless these new Google rules are met, Google maps described in
The U.S. Regional SAS Users Group Conferences are smaller, intimate conferences where you can show off your SAS expertise. The conference coordinators are always looking for strong presenters and keynote speakers. Many of our authors use these conferences to gather immediate feedback on their book topic. And let’s not forget
Do you know something about SAS® software that other SAS users would love to learn? Of course you do! Whether you’re a student or a member of the Circle of Excellence, every SAS programming project, every analysis or forecasting model is an opportunity to gain new insights into SAS processing
IT folks love SQL (Standard Query Language). Once you know how to program in SQL, you can work with almost any database because it is a standard. However, SQL is NOT a standard for doing analytics. The SAS programming language pre-dates SQL and even though SAS does SQL, SQL does not
In a previous blog post, I showed how to overlay a prediction ellipse on a scatter plot in SAS by using the ELLIPSE statement in PROC SGPLOT. The ELLIPSE statement draws the ellipse by using a standard technique that assumes the sample is bivariate normal. Today's article describes the technique
The sun has gone eerily quiet, in the middle of what should be the height of the 11-year sunspot cycle... Here's a superb photo of some sunspots that Stephen A. Carr posted to the Telescope Addicts Facebook group - a group which I follow with great interest. (Thanks for allowing
This post could be titled something like "Everything you wanted to know about Group Order in GTL - and more." The group ordering shows up in three different ways in your graph. Assignment of attributes (color, marker symbol) to group values. Position of group values in the graph. Display of the group
Although I’m not particularly excited about football (I admit, I don’t completely understand what offside means), I did follow the last World Cup with more than average attention. Not only for the handsome players, but especially for all the fascinating statistics that appeared. It struck me that heat maps popped
