In the energy industry, oil and gas companies as well as utilities are struggling with many changes at once. First, they're facing what the oil and gas industry has coined "the big crew change," meaning the retirement of those with the most skills and experience on how to run their
SAS administration and support can be a real challenge for some companies. It all has to do with not having the right resources and skills. Business analysts are often charged with maintaining SAS. They know data, but they don’t have the IT skills needed to properly support SAS. IT teams
Protein seems to be everywhere these days from television ads to magazines to grocery store shelves. With all the publicity surrounding protein, you’d think Americans weren’t getting enough of it while in reality, most of us consume more than enough protein.
Did you check your email and/or favourite social media site before leaving for work this morning? Did you do it before getting out of bed? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. I do it every morning as a little treat while I “wake up” and whether I realize it or not,
In my book Simulating Data with SAS, I show how to use the SAS DATA step to simulate data from a logistic regression model. Recently there have been discussions on the SAS/IML Support Community about simulating logistic data by using the SAS/IML language. This article describes how to efficiently simulate
I speak with executives in every industry – in companies big and small – and they all have the same challenge: They’re overwhelmed with data. The problem? There’s a huge gap between the amount of data they possess and the number of employees who can analyze it. This lack of
One of my favorite bands, Kings of Leon, is touring again this year and making a stop in Raleigh. I didn’t want to take any chances that I might miss them playing in my hometown so I bought tickets as soon as they went on sale. As you might agree,
The healthcare big data revolution has only just begun. Current efforts percolating around the country primarily surround aggregation of clinical electronic health records (EHRs) & administrative healthcare claims. These healthcare big data initiatives are gaining traction and could produce exciting enhancements to the effectiveness and efficiency of the US healthcare
As you develop a program in the SAS/IML language, it is often useful to create graphs to visualize intermediate results. The language supports basic statistical graphics such as bar charts, histograms, scatter plots, and so on. However, you can create more advanced graphics without leaving PROC IML by using the
At PharmaSUG 2014 in San Diego, I had the pleasure of attending "Swimmer Plot: Tell a Graphical Story of Your Time to Response Data Using PROC SGPLOT", by Stacey Phillips. In this paper, Stacey presented an interesting graph showing the effects of a study drug on patients' tumor size. Stacey
Having spent a good part of my career “owning” the data hub in IT for analytics solutions, I think I can say, the myth that IT controls all things data has become less and less true through the years – and eventually it will be completely false. Or maybe it
Last month, SAS launched our new no-cost software for higher education teaching, learning and research – SAS® University Edition. Available to students, professors, academic researchers and lifelong learners, SAS University Edition provides local access to BASE SAS®, SAS/STAT® software, SAS® Studio, SAS/IML® software and SAS/ACCESS® Interface to PC Files. SAS University Edition
My esteemed colleague and recently-published author Jared Dean shared some thoughts on how ensemble models help make better predictions. For predictive modeling, Jared explains the value of two main forms of ensembles --bagging and boosting. It should not be surprising that the idea of combining predictions from more than one
A colleague asked me an interesting question: I have a journal article that includes sample quantiles for a variable. Given a new data value, I want to approximate its quantile. I also want to simulate data from the distribution of the published data. Is that possible? This situation is common.
Today it is common knowledge that a classroom teacher is the single largest in-school influence on student academic growth[1]. So when South Carolina received ESEA flexibility in July, 2012, the State Department of Education immediately began an initiative empowering teachers to increase their own effectiveness. Known as the Educator Evaluation System
Recently, a user posed a question on how to plot stacked frequencies on a time axis. The data included frequencies of different viruses by week. The data is modified to preserve confidentiality and is shown below. The user's first instinct was to use a bar chart with stacked groups. This works for automatically computing frequencies
Principle 11: Risk management reports should be distributed to the relevant parties while ensuring confidentiality is maintained. Early in 2013, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) issued guidelines for banks regarding risk data aggregation and reporting. Known collectively as BCBC 239, these principles were designed to ensure that banks
I've pointed out in the past that in the SAS/IML language matrices are passed to modules "by reference." This means that large matrices are not copied in and out of modules but are updated "in place." As a result, the SAS/IML language can be very efficient when it computes with
In 1965's Subterranean Homesick Blues, Bob Dylan taught us: You don't need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows In 1972's You Don't Mess Around with Jim, Jim Croce taught us: You don't spit into the wind By combining these two teachings, one can logically conclude that:
Yes, I use SAS for everything - even determining how many more Friday the 13th we have this year... ----- I woke up this morning (June 13, 2014) and realized it was Friday the 13th. We haven't had one in a while (not since last year, actually), and I got to
Let’s be honest. When well planned, a SAS Grid Computing platform as the basis for a shared, highly available, high-performance analytics environment can pay for itself many times over. However, it is critical that your overall objectives and computing environment be well understood for you to achieve success with your
Today is my 500th blog post for The DO Loop. I decided to celebrate by doing what I always do: discuss a statistical problem and show how to solve it by writing a program in SAS. Two ways to parameterize the lognormal distribution I recently blogged about the relationship between
This probably won't surprise any of my regular readers: "SAS custom tasks" is one of my favorite topics to talk about. Since 2007, I've written blogs about how you can use custom tasks to extend SAS Enterprise Guide and the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. I've shared lots of examples,
Our tradition from Foresight’s birth in 2005 has been to feature a particular topic of interest and value to practicing forecasters. These feature sections have covered a wide range of areas: the politics of forecasting, how and when to judgmentally adjust statistical forecasts, forecasting support systems, why we should
In 1990, the North Carolina General Assembly created the Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission to evaluate sentencing laws and policies and recommend any modifications necessary to achieve policy goals. As part of the mandate, the General Assembly required the Sentencing Commission to develop a correctional population simulation model. The model
From managing excess DVD inventory to optimizing digital distribution channels, Hollywood’s supply chain transformation in the last decade has been massive. Knowing this background, and having spent a good part of my life surrounded by the entertainment industry, I was intrigued and inspired by the recent Entertainment Supply Chain Academy
As SAS software continues to develop, the demand for information grows. That’s why there’s a big recruitment effort underway at SAS Books to get experts to share their best practices on using SAS. Recruiter Shelley Sessoms attended the Analytics 2014 conference in Frankfurt, Germany last week to find new writers.
SAS software can be used for many things - here's how you could use it to help save endangered sea turtles! You've seen SAS used to track endangered wildlife by the shape of their footprints, and help run Texas Parks & Wildlife. Now, how about tracking the movements of (and thereby helping
There are thousands of kitchen gadgets on the market designed to make cooking easier, quicker and more efficient. However, most of these gadgets serve one specific purpose and take up prime kitchen real estate. After a few uses they end up being thrown in the back of a drawer or
Nonlinear optimization routines enable you to find the values of variables that optimize an objective function of those variables. When you use a numerical optimization routine, you need to provide an initial guess, often called a "starting point" for the algorithm. Optimization routines iteratively improve the initial guess in an
