Collaboration can be difficult, but what if you could provide a template that helps everyone work together more efficiently? The Post-It note author below has developed such a tool and suggests using it as a guide for accepted coding standards. You can also use templates to control the look of
Apply now for the SAS Global Forum Junior Professional Award. Only 20 professionals will be selected. Congratulations to the SCSUG awardees!
If you haven’t heard of an APCD, it’s one of those acronyms you need to know. All-Payer Claims Databases are simply databases that consist of claims data from all health care payers in a given state. This includes private payers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield, and public payers such
Recently, I shared a summary of Brian Varney’s SESUG presentation on How to document your SAS environment. One important step was determining where files that control overall processing, such as autoexec.sas files, are deployed. For installations on a single server or platform, Varney suggested using the OPTIONS procedure, which lists
Frequently someone will post a question to the SAS Support Community that says something like this: I am trying to do [statistical task]and SAS issues an error and reports that my correlation matrix is not positive definite. What is going on and how can I complete [the task]? The statistical
“So, you work for SAS?” asked my co-passenger. I was on the plane to Baltimore to attend my first NESUG conference and the tag on my laptop bag was the clue. I happened to be seated next to a SAS user who was familiar with ODS Graphics. I ended up
Several weeks ago, South Carolina was the victim of what some experts believe to be the largest cyber-attack against a state tax department in history. Approximately 3.6 million personal South Carolina income tax returns were exposed, and nearly 657,000 businesses compromised, in an international hacking attack. Coincidentally, SAS and the SC
Hello, everyone! I’m excited to be part of this great blog and share a few of my ideas. A little about me – I’m a marketer at heart, passionate about strategy, creativity, branding and analytics. I love discovering marketing lessons by examining things around me. At SAS, I’m a marketing
Jenine Milum is the Vice President and Analytics Manager at Wells Fargo Bank. About 10 years ago, she learned a valuable, but little known solution to cutting the CPU processing time when dealing with large data sets. "We were processing log activity for our website on a daily basis," says Milum,
As previously mentioned, I attended this year's DMA Annual Conference as a sponsor and found many ways that it was a wonderful experience as both a sponsor and an attendee. That said, there actually was one part of my DMA experience that gave me pause enough to want to share it
Have you used the MEANS procedure to calculate frequencies: for several variables in the same step? without sorting the data first? without checking for missing values? using the TYPE statement and the CLASS statement together? At the recent SouthEastern SAS Users Group conference, Janet Willis shared what can go wrong
Last week I wrote about using acceptance-rejection algorithms in vector languages to simulate data. The main point I made is that in a vector language it is efficient to generate many more variates than are needed, with the knowledge that a certain proportion will be rejected. In last week's article,
Recently, top executives from SAS gathered in Washington, DC with customers and other interested parties to discuss the potential impact of "big data" and high-performance analytics on the U.S. government. Topics included cyber-attack strategies, health care, bio-surveillance, border security and of course, fraud and improper payments. On the heels of
Kirk Paul Lafler, Software Intelligence Corporation, has written four SAS books and more than 500 peer-reviewed papers - 19 of which were awarded Best Contributed Papers or Poster, so I’m going to believe him when he says that he’s figured out a thing or two about tuning SAS systems.
A recent question by a user lead led me to experiment with what is often referred to as conditional highlighting. The user wanted to display a bar chart of response by year, where each bar is colored by year, and show a cross hatch pattern on the bars where the
Have you heard the expression "Talk Turkey"? Well then, what better (tongue-in-cheek) thing to do around the Thanksgiving holiday, than talk some turkey using SAS Graphs! ;) I don't usually decorate my graphs with images and pictures (they typically make the graph more difficult to read), but when it comes
For some odd reason, the open-source Apache Hadoop ecosystem consists of cleverly named components that seem to have escaped from the Central Park Zoo. You may be aware that the little yellow elephant named Hadoop was actually a stuffed toy that Doug Cutting’s son owned. (Doug is the co-creator of
The LOC function is one of the most important functions in the SAS/IML language. The LOC function finds elements of a vector or matrix that satisfy some condition. For example, if you are going to apply a logarithmic transform to data, you can use the LOC function to find all
Most custom tasks need to access SAS data in some way. Since custom tasks are built using Microsoft .NET, and the .NET Framework is object-oriented, it would be convenient if we had an object-oriented method for navigating SAS data sources. That was the thinking behind the "SasData"-namespace classes within the
As the holidays approach, we’ll all have some down-time to catch up on personal and professional reading, hopefully cozied up by a fire with a cup of hot chocolate in hand. While most books regarding data-driven decision making and value-added analyses can be pretty heavy, I’d like to suggest two
The number one rule about product launch blogging is to never blog about your product launch. Take that, Fight Club! And yet, most marketers are expected to write multiple blog posts in conjunction with a launch. How do the smart marketers do it? They talk about the issues and share their
In pharmaceutical research, analysts often want to see the number of respondents who are at each site and the treatment they receive. Apparently, there's more than one way to produce correct results when you are using the PROC MEANS procedure. In Janet Willis' paper, Do You Have Too Much Class?, (awarded Best
Are you considering submitting a paper to the SAS Global Forum? The deadline for submissions is right around the corner – here’s some ideas to help you get your paper selected! Steve Overton and Tricia Aanderud have presented papers at several of the SAS user groups and here are a
Analytics maturity is a hot topic right now. Many come to SAS for answers on how to assess their analytics maturity and advance their use of analytics, especially at a corporate level. I want to share the highlights of what we usually prescribe from a best practices perspective regarding advancing
I recently had a student in a SAS Enterprise Guide class declare that EG was the next best thing since sliced bread. I couldn't have agreed with her more! In this post, I‘ll share four ways where EG outperforms SAS code –yes I know you’re a codeaholic dear reader, but these reasons
'Develop an Analytic Center of Excellence (COE)' could be translated to – develop a culture of analytics in your organization such that every department and division sees value in analytics and pursues measurement for all strategic decisions.
As one of the external instructors for the SAS Platform Administrator Fast Track course in Australia, I have found that the students who attend the courses come from diverse backgrounds. My experience so far has been an approximate 50-50 split, with half being IT system administrators wanting to learn how
A few days ago on the SAS/IML Support Community, there was an interesting discussion about how to simulate data from a truncated Poisson distribution. The SAS/IML user wanted to generate values from a Poisson distribution, but discard any zeros that are generated. This kind of simulation is known as an
Justin Smith and William “Gui” Zupko were looking at manufacturing data over time and wanted to know the minimum value in their dataset, and they wanted to pinpoint its exact location – the specific row and column. PROC ARIMA uses the ARIMA (auto-regressive integrated moving average) model or the ARMA
Editor's note: This post was updated on 8/5/16. “One time a fellow came up to me and said, ‘Tell me something unique about you,” said David Chapman, of Chapman Analytics, “I said, ‘I used SAS when SAS was free.” Needless to say, Chapman has been using SAS for a long
