The SAS Global Forum 2015 Call for Papers opened the end of last month! I cannot believe it is time to start getting ready for the conference that will be in Dallas, TX on April 26-29, 2015. As part of the group from SAS who goes to the conference each
Ahhh, summer!! It’s such a beautiful time of year. All the fresh produce comes out of the fields at a rapid pace giving us an abundance of deliciousness and beautiful colors to thrill our bodies and souls.
One of the things I enjoy about blogging is that I often learn something new. Last week I wrote about how to optimize a function that is defined in terms of an integral. While developing the program in the article, I made some mistakes that generated SAS/IML error messages. By
This article is by guest contributor Lelia McConnell, SAS Tech Support. Creating Spaghetti Plots Just Got Easy Sample 38076: “Response by patient and treatment group” illustrates how to generate a spaghetti plot using the SGPLOT procedure. Sample 40255: “Plot of study results by treatment group” illustrates how to generate a
After the 2014 FIFA World Cup, one thing’s clear: here at SAS, we love football (soccer in the US!). To wrap up the popular 2014 World Cup data visualization series on the SAS Visual Analytics Community, we created a presentation that’s chocked-full of interesting insights. From the trillions of pieces
I’m sitting here staring at a book on my shelf entitled, “Impending Crisis”. Even knowing the copyright date, 2003, it could still be about any one of several possible crises: healthcare, financial, energy, education, environment. But no, in this case the impending crisis in question is provided by the subtitle: “Too many jobs,
This fall, you’ll be swept off your feet in the Windy City: The 2014 Midwest SAS User’s Group (MWSUG) takes place in Chicago from October 5-7. With 135 presentations in 11 different sections, you’ll have the chance to expand your SAS know-how and network with fellow SAS professionals.
A SAS customer wrote, "I have access to PROC IML through SAS OnDemand for Academics. What is the best way for me to learn to program in the SAS/IML language? How do I get started with PROC IML?" That is an excellent question, and I'm happy to offer some suggestions.
A few weeks back I wrote an article on Grouped Timeline for creating a stacked timeline for onset of different virus. The idea in that article was to display a stacked needle on a time axis using a HighLow plot. Such graphs are also referred to as EPI or Epidemic Curve
It is a mild summer evening in July at Lake Neusiedl here in Austria. The participants of the traditional YES Cup Regatta are sitting with beer and barbecue chops on the terrace of our clubhouse. The mood is relaxed, and everyone wants to tell their story after two eventful races.
On Facebook the other day a friend “liked” one of her friend’s posts, so it appeared in my news feed. I opened the link, read the article and started crying. You would have too. It was an article by a former social worker in Durham County, N.C. on what it was like
The Amazon River starts as a small glacial stream, pictured at right, on a mountain called Nevado Mismi in the Peruvian Andes. This, and many other small streams, lead to over 1,000 named tributaries of the largest drainage basin in the world -- and the greatest diversity of life on
What’s not so great about summer? The post workout shower sweat. You know what I’m talking about. You had a great workout: 3 minute warm up, 40 minutes of sweaty intervals, followed by a 2 minute “cool down” which involved you walking from the gym into the locker room. You
The SAS/IML language is used for many kinds of computations, but three important numerical tasks are integration, optimization, and root finding. Recently a SAS customer asked for help with a problem that involved all three tasks. The customer had an objective function that was defined in terms of an integral.
Today SAS began shipping the second maintenance release of SAS 9.4, colloquially known as "SAS 9.4M2". This is an incremental release, meant to build upon the already-solid SAS 9.4 platform. Even as a SAS insider, I cannot possibly keep track of every new feature that has been added in maintenance.
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
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
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
