Suppose that you have several data distributions that you want to compare. Questions you might ask include "Which variable has the largest spread?" and "Which variables exhibit skewness?" More generally, you might be interested in visualizing how the distribution of one variable differs from the distribution of other variables. The
As part of my follow-up to SAS Global Forum 2013, I've posted a few articles about how to create your own client apps with SAS Integration Technologies. This article shows how to use Microsoft .NET -- the same approach used for SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office
This week's SAS tip is from Michele Burlew and her book SAS Macro Programming Made Easy, Second Edition. Michele is the author of several extremely helpful SAS books. Visit her author page to learn more about her work and for additional free content. The following excerpt is from SAS Press
Are you going to Analytics 2013 in London?!? And if so, have you found any fun/interesting/touristy things to do while you're there? ... Being an analytics conference, I thought it would be good to apply some "analytics" to the task! So I took some locations in the British Isles that I thought
John Heaton is no stranger to the often frustrating process of migrating code between environments after software updates. While release management and version control may often be afterthoughts, Heaton cautions that ignoring them could be “time consuming and disastrous should errors occur.” His winning SAS Global Forum paper SAS® Release
At a time when information is proliferating at an unprecedented rate, companies that can effectively gather, create and use information can gain dramatic market advantages over those that don’t. SMB Group’s 2012 Routes to Market Study shows that SMBs that have deployed business intelligence and analytics solutions are 51% more
Last week I showed how to use simulation to estimate the power of a statistical test. I used the two-sample t test to illustrate the technique. In my example, the difference between the means of two groups was 1.2, and the simulation estimated a probability of 0.72 that the t
One of the great things about SAS libraries is that you can write your programs to read and write data without having to worry about where the data lives. SAS data set on a file system? Oracle table in a database server? Hadoop data in Hive? For many SAS applications,
A SAS user told me that he computed a vector of values in the SAS/IML language and wanted to use those values on a statement in a SAS procedure. The particular application involved wanting to use the values on the ESTIMATE and CONTRAST statements in a SAS regression procedure, but
They say "Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery"... Therefore when I imitate Hans Rosling's famous world-data animation, it's not that I'm jealous, but that I'm paying homage to him! (OK, and maybe also a little bit jealous! LOL) Well, anyway, for those of you who haven't seen it,
Reading Jan Bigalke’s SAS Global Forum paper on “Hardening a SAS® Installation on a multi tier installation on Linux" reminded me of baking apple stack cake with my mother. Neither is a simple project. Both are time-consuming, and their success depends on how skillfully you handle each layer. Data security
The power of a statistical test measures the test's ability to detect a specific alternate hypothesis. For example, educational researchers might want to compare the mean scores of boys and girls on a standardized test. They plan to use the well-known two-sample t test. The null hypothesis is that the
As a marketer interested in analyzing my campaign data visually, I recently had a chance to slow down and read this TDWI checklist report entitled “Seven Steps to Deploying Visual Analytic for Improving Actionable Insight” by Dave Stodder, Director of TDWI Research for Business Intelligence. What it helped me understand is
If you write a blog, you deal with spam comments. That's just part of the deal. Spammers are forever inventing new and creative methods for "tricking" you into accepting their spam comments. These comments have nothing to do with your blog topic but do contain trackback links to their own
Has anyone noticed that the REG procedure in SAS/STAT 12.1 produces heat maps instead of scatter plots for fit plots and residual plots when the regression involves more than 5,000 observations? I wasn't aware of the change until a colleague informed me, although the change is discussed in the "Details"
The Data Visualization Charting 101 seriesexplores different tools to visualize data. Check out other posts to see which data visualization is right for you. My grandmother often used the saying “as the crow flies” when giving directions, referring to a straight line being the shortest distance between two points. When
This week's SAS tip is from Ron Cody and his latest book Cody's Collection of Popular SAS Programming Tasks and How to Tackle Them. Learn more about this esteemed user and his many bestselling SAS books--as well as get additional bonus content on his author page. The following excerpt is from
At SAS, one of our core values is to be swift and agile. So it makes sense that our software development be Agile too. The Agile methodology has been around for more than 10 years and was designed with software development in mind. Today, it is still used predominately for
In my article "Simulation in SAS: The slow way or the BY way," I showed how to use BY-group processing rather than a macro loop in order to efficiently analyze simulated data with SAS. In the example, I analyzed the simulated data by using PROC MEANS, and I use the
Often we want to visualize the relationship between variables over time. The understanding of such data can be improved by viewing the animated graph over time. With SAS 9.4, you can create animated graphs using the new animation options on the OPTIONS statement and the PRINTER destination. A popular example an
What does big data know that you don't? It could be a new source of revenue, a budding consumer trend or ... something sinister! Find out what big data knows in this funny but telling video spot: Look familiar? Do you know that guy? Share this funny big data video
I recently read an interesting article in The Economist, where they describe "The Big Mac index." This is an index they invented as a lighthearted guide to compare currencies in different countries. In their article they create a multi-panel display (similar to a dashboard) where they compare the index for several countries using
A good chunk of the SAS year revolves around SAS Global Forum. Pre-conference, everyone is busy polishing presentations and planning meetings. Post-conference is the best—attendees come back to Cary with heads full of customer ideas to implement and notebooks full of contacts to follow up on. One user's request found its
Humans have over 10,000 taste buds which are made up of hundreds of receptor cells that control our sense of taste. Each type of receptor responds to one of these 5 basic tastes: Sweet: activated by presence of sugars (ie: fruit, sugary drinks, desserts) Salty: activated by presence sodium chloride
Two years ago, Brad Pitt starred in Moneyball, an Academy Award-nominated story about Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane bringing the power of advanced analytics to the sport. Beane wasn’t the first to use statistical analytics to build a successful team and keep its payroll in check. Baseball and political
Last week I discussed a program that had three nested loops that used scalar operations in the innermost loop. I mentioned that this program was not vectorized, and would therefore be slow in a matrix language such as SAS/IML, MATLAB, or R. I then went through a series of steps
The value of analytics to solve multiple business problems really makes analytics the ultimate reusable business investment, or as they say in the energy industry, it may be called a renewable resource. As I've commented before, organizations spend billions of dollars on storing data, and unless you happen to be a
Last week I alluded to some very useful applications of the Copy Files task. This is one of them. If you have SAS Enterprise Guide 7.13 or later, the Copy Files task is in the Tasks->Data menu. In earlier versions, you'll have to download/install the task as a custom task.
Every time you see a rainbow, do you look to see where it begins and where it ends? Legend has it that there is a pot of gold at the end of each rainbow with leprechauns guarding it. While this might be popular Irish folklore, and you may not find
For programmers who are learning the SAS/IML language, it is sometimes confusing that there are two kinds of multiplication operators, whereas in the SAS DATA step there is only scalar multiplication. This article describes the multiplication operators in the SAS/IML language and how to use them to perform common tasks
