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
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
