In my four years of blogging, the post that has generated the most comments is "How to handle negative values in log transformations." Many people have written to describe data that contain negative values and to ask for advice about how to log-transform the data. Today I describe a transformation
Young digital natives are learning chess at an unprecedented rate. Three-year-olds learn chess from the tablet and quickly become more knowledgeable than their parents. But unlike most tablet games, chess is a gateway to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. We grown-ups must optimize the chess-to-STEM pipeline, but how? Consider this
Did you inherit code that was written eons ago? Do you find old programs to copy the PROC REPORT code and then simply change the variable names for your new program? Have you wondered what all of those options do? Do you ever send output to the Listing destination (the
Order must be the most frequent cry for help in the SAS classroom. “HELP,” said my student in the classroom. “I work with messy health data. My users want to see data in this order.” T1.col1, t1.col2, t1.col3, t1.col4, t2.col5, t1.col6 and list the remaining columns in column position from
In my previous blog post, I showed how to use log axes on a scatter plot in SAS to better visualize data that range over several orders of magnitude. Because the data contained counts (some of which were zero), I used a custom transformation x → log10(x+1) to visualize the
Data visualization tools are a great way to create impactful reports. A well designed report can give users an understanding of their data quickly and easily. And with tools like SAS® Visual Analytics, users can now quickly visualize and understand vast amounts of data. However, with all the visualization options
You’re walking around the bookstore at SAS Global Forum, looking at the new books and upcoming titles. There are lots of titles that look helpful, and a couple that are on your must-have list. You see SAS users and students eagerly talking with the authors, treating them like rock stars.
SAS users love to look at data. And the data grid in SAS Enterprise Guide is a convenient way to view the contents of a data set. While small data sets can be rendered lickity-split for quick viewing, sometimes people get justifiably anxious when opening very large data. Perhaps they've
Recently, the American Statistical Association (ASA) released a statement about value-added modeling. This statement was widely covered in the national press, some of which positioned the statement as a significant blow to value-added modeling. However, the ASA statement did not “slam” value-added modeling; rather, the statement’s authors advocated statistical rigor,
I bet a lot of SAS users know where the phrase "Live Long and Prosper" comes from ... but can we use SAS software to also help analyze 'how long'? This blog posting shows several different kinds of SAS graphs that can help answer such a question! Let's start with
When new SAS users get introduced to the SAS Business Intelligence software (SAS BI), along with the thrill of a wide spectrum of new and desirable functionality, almost always comes a state of confusion – if not panic. How do we go about adapting it to our organization IT guidelines?
Did you know that almost 70 percent of Americans take at least one prescription medication? More than half take at least two, according to a new study by researchers at the Mayo Clinic. And according to the CDC, the average American is on six different medications by the age of
If you are trying to visualize numerical data that range over several magnitudes, conventional wisdom says that a log transformation of the data can often result in a better visualization. This article shows several ways to create a scatter plot with logarithmic axes in SAS and discusses some of the
Spirals are cool. And useful. We use them every day without thinking about it. Every time the road turns from a straight line to a curve, we go through a transition spiral. Spirals allow us to change curvature in a steady increasing or decreasing fashion. Without a spiral, this
The word “analytics” is widely misused and misunderstood. While SAS arguably invented the advanced analytics and predictive analytics categories more than 38 years ago, other software vendors have used the term to describe things like reporting, monitoring, and tracking what happened. The value of these more simple capabilities are easily
This morning, a fairly strong earthquake struck southern Mexico - can SAS analyze past earthquake data to help predict future earthquakes?... I don't have any pictures of earthquake damage, but here's one I took of the main house/prop from the Snow Camp Outdoor Theatre here in North Carolina - I imagine this
A few years ago I blogged about how to expand a data set by using a frequency variable. The DATA step in the article was simple, but the SAS/IML function was somewhat complicated and used a DO loop to expand the data. (Although a reader later showed how to avoid
On July 24, 10am ET, Stavros Asimakopoulos delivers the next installment of the Foresight/SAS Webinar Series, "Forecasting 'In the Pocket': Mobile Devices Can Improve Collaboration." Based on his article (co-authored with George Boretos and Constantinos Mourlas) in the Winter 2014 issue of Foresight, Stavros will discuss how smartphones, tablet computers
Everyone is intrigued by natural disasters - can we predict the likelihood of multiple disasters happening simultaneously?... My friend Rochelle is an avid SCUBA diver - here's a photo of a shark she got to 'smile for a picture' on a recent dive trip: Rochelle was asking if I could use SAS to
This blog is a continuation of an earlier blog entitled “To grid or not to grid?” In that blog, one of the reasons to say “yes to SAS Grid” is to see if you can gain some performance improvements from modifying your existing SAS processes by converting them to a
A SAS customer showed me a SAS/IML program that he had obtained from a book. The program was taking a long time to run on his data, which was somewhat large. He was wondering if I could identify any inefficiencies in the program. The first thing I did was to
Welcome. I'm so glad you're here! This topic will feature tips, stories, and fun to help you on your path to wellness. Look for posts on the first and third Wednesday of each month. What is "wellness"? Wellness is defined by the The American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary as the condition
There are many factors that go into creating the next advanced analytics products at SAS, but Radhika Kulkarni, Vice President of Advanced Analytics told me there’s one main driving force. I caught up with her at the Analytics 2014 conference to talk more about advanced analytics and what products you
Principle 13: Remedial actions and supervisory measures - Supervisors should have and use the appropriate tools and resources to require effective and timely remedial action by a bank to address deficiencies in its risk data aggregation capabilities and risk reporting practices. Supervisors should have the ability to use a range
The old saying KISS (Keep It Simple) can be applied to just about anything, including sports analytics. Here I use SAS to create some simple charts to analyze a winning soccer team... To get you into the right mood, here is a picture of my friend Jennifer's dog, who loves soccer :) In
Last week I showed how to use the SUBMIT and ENDSUBMIT statements in the SAS/IML language to call the SGPLOT procedure to create ODS graphs of data that are in SAS/IML vectors and matrices. I also showed how to create a SAS/IML module that hides the details and enables you
The topic of VENN diagrams had come up a while ago. At that time, I thought it may be interesting to build a proportional VENN diagram. But, reading up on VENN Diagrams, I learned that VENN diagrams represent all intersections of N sets, regardless of whether there are actually any observations in one
The BFD blog probably won't make you the best forecaster you can be. There are plenty of books and articles and world class forecasting researchers (many of them meeting next week in Rotterdam at the International Symposium on Forecasting), that can teach you the most sophisticated techniques to squeeze every last
My last blog post showed how to simulate data for a logistic regression model with two continuous variables. To keep the discussion simple, I simulated a single sample with N observations. However, to obtain the sampling distribution of statistics, you need to generate many samples from the same logistic model.
By now you have heard all about the SAS(R) STUDIO software that provides access to the power of SAS analytics in a Web browser. The SAS(R) University Edition is also available free for higher education teaching, learning and research. This software includes ODS Graphics software for creating graphs. You can
