A common visualization is to compare characteristics of two groups. This article emphasizes two tips that will help make the comparison clear. First, consider graphing the differences between the groups. Second, in any plot that has a categorical axis, sort the categories by a meaningful quantity. This article is motivated
SAS 9.4 was released a month ago, and we are excited about all the new features in SG Procedures, GTL and Designer. I wrote an article on SAS 9.4 graph features last month, and promised more to come. What then could be better than this Tech Talk video hosted by our
Remember being young and bursting with anticipation of the next show and tell? You knew you had something really amazing to share, and you wanted your classmates to see or hear it. Get ready for that same feeling of excitement and anticipation. Because it’s back. On a much bigger, global
Even the best programmers make mistakes. For most errors, SAS software displays the nature and location of the error, returns control to the programmer, and awaits further instructions. However, there are a handful of insidious errors that cause SAS to think that a statement or program is not finished. For
I'm happy to announce the SAS Data Management support community has a new look and feel! And there’s lots of additional content and resources now too. The SAS Data Management community on support.sas.com is a central hub for anyone interested in SAS data access, integration, quality and governance. Community Manager
In SAS 9.4, the SAS programming language continues add new features by the truckload. I've already discussed PROC DELETE (which is actually an old feature, but like an 80s hit song it's now back with a better version). In this SAS Tech Talk video from SAS Global Forum 2013, I
What do you do all day long? I spend my time speaking with customers about what’s new in SAS 9.4, answering technical questions, and showing new users what they can do in SAS. You might spend your time on SAS data management tasks such as bringing in data and joining
The words "Detox" or "Detoxification" get thrown around a lot these days but few people know what these words really mean. Detoxification in reference to human health refers to your body’s ability to convert, or biotransform, waste products and toxins into non-toxic substances that can be excreted from the body.
Earlier this week I posted a "guest blog" in which my 8th grade son described a visualization of data for the 2013 ASA Poster Competition. The purpose of today's blog post is to present a higher-level statistical analysis of the same data. I will use a t test and a
As the NorthEast SAS Users Group (NESUG) approaches, I sat down with NESUG volunteer and Executive Committee member Sue Douglass to discuss all the features of this year’s conference and why SAS users can’t wait to register. This year, they’re offering over 125 papers, expanded preconference training sessions and perennial
As student growth or value-added measures become more prevalent in educator evaluation systems, many question how those ratings actually help teachers improve their practice. i.e. “How does a level 3 teacher become a level 4 or 5?” Robust and reliable value-added data serve as a great starting point for teachers
Editor's Note: My 8th grade son, David, created a poster that he submitted to the 2013 ASA Poster Competition. The competition encourages students to display "two or more related graphics that summarize a set of data, look at the data from different points of view, and answer specific questions about
The graphs produced by the SG procedures (and GTL) have a default look and feel designed for the common use cases. However, everyone has a preference for some special features that make the graphs unique. Fortunately, extensive customizations can be made to graphs produced by these tools using statement and
John Taylor likes computer data the way he likes big trout: here, there or anywhere. Which is perfectly natural, considering he’s the data analyst in the Inland Fisheries Department at Texas Parks and Wildlife. Taylor describes his unspoiled enthusiasm for big data and big fish in this sendup of Dr. Seuss that
If you're a software developer, you're probably already familiar with these terms: I18N and L10N. Internationalization (I + 18 letters + N = I18N) The discipline of preparing your software to run correctly in different languages with different culture settings. For example, the software must be able to accommodate multibyte
An updated version of the SAS Hot Fix Analysis, Download and Deployment Tool (SASHFADD) has just been released on the SAS Technical Support Hot Fix site. If you are not familiar with SASHFADD (pronounced SAS-H-F-ADD), it’s a tool that will analyze a SAS 9.2, SAS 9.3 or SAS 9.4 deployment
My previous post described the multinomial distribution and showed how to generate random data from the multinomial distribution in SAS by using the RANDMULTINOMIAL function in SAS/IML software. The RANDMULTINOMIAL function is simple to use and implements an efficient algorithm called the sequential conditional marginal method (see Gentle (2003), p.
With the pervasiveness of mobile devices, being able to read while “on the go” has been easier than ever. How many times have you found yourself in a situation where you pass the time waiting by reading something on your phone/iPad/tablet etc? With eBooks on my iPad, I find that
As promised, here is a better combined AE-CM graph, using some of the UI improvements suggested by our UI expert, Riley. His suggestions helped to reduce the clutter in the graph, while still keeping all the features preferred by our users. Click on the graphs for a higher resolution image.
Celebrations happen throughout the year. Here at SAS, we like to celebrate our users. The global Circle of Excellence program was started a little over a year ago to achieve this goal. We have been getting stories from you guys and posting them. Well, a new group for 2013 has
This article describes how to generate random samples from the multinomial distribution in SAS. The content is taken from Chapter 8 of my book Simulating Data with SAS. The multinomial distribution is a discrete multivariate distribution. Suppose there are k different types of items in a box, such as a
With the release of SAS 9.4 (which included SAS/STAT 12.3 and SAS Enterprise Guide 6.1), you might seriously consider hiring a Chief Versions Officer (CVO). Fortunately, most of the recent versions of SAS Enterprise Guide work with the different recent versions of SAS, so you have some flexibility as you
Missing San Francisco already? I caught up with the SAS Global Forum 2013 paper winners and asked them to share some of their insights about their work, the conference and what they took away from the experience. To kick off this series, I've posted their words of wisdom for other SAS Users. The question was
How old is your version of SAS software? The graph on the left shows the release dates for various releases of SAS software, beginning with SAS 8.0. The graph is based on a graph on Jiangtang Hu's blog that shows the major SAS releases. As this graph demonstrates, SAS software
At the SAS Global Forum 2013 in San Francisco, I presented a paper on making Patient Profile Graphs using SAS. You can follow the link to see the graphs presented in this paper. In that paper, I presented ways to create AE, CM, VS and Lab graphs. I discussed aligning the
Previously I've described how you can use SAS Enterprise Guide to send an e-mail message using Gmail as your e-mail provider. In the article, I mentioned that you can also write SAS programs that send e-mail messages, but at the time you could not reach Gmail using the FILENAME EMAIL
Users often ask if there are any major tuning efforts that need to be made in order for SAS to execute ideally in a virtual environment. The quick answer is "not really". The longer answer is “it helps to set up your virtual environment properly.” There are a few minor
Do you have dozens (or even hundreds) of SAS data sets that you want to read into SAS/IML matrices? In a previous blog post, I showed how to iterate over a series of data sets and analyze each one. Inside the loop, I read each data set into a matrix
From an Enterprise Guide user's perspective, a SAS library is a library. Whether it was defined in the autoexec or in the metadata or by magic, it is there for them to use with no issues. However, there is a difference as metadata defined libraries do not behave in the
One of my favorite features of SAS/IML 12.1 (released with 9.3m2) is that the USE and CLOSE statements support reading data set names that are specified in a SAS/IML matrix. The IMLPlus language in SAS/IML Studio has supported this syntax since the early 2000s, so I am pleased that this
