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
Recent versions of SAS Enterprise Guide (version 5.1 and later) use Microsoft .NET 4.0, which enforces additional security requirements before running custom task DLLs that you download from the Web, including those that you download from support.sas.com. Because these task DLLs are downloaded from the (big and scary) Internet, the
The Data Visualization Charting 101 series explores different tools to visualize data. Check out other posts to see which data visualization is right for you. Have so much data that your head is spinning? If you have a lot of data that needs to be visualized, a scatter plot, aka
Students with missing test scores are often highly mobile students and are more likely to be low-achieving students. It is important to include these students in any growth/value-added model to avoid selection bias, which could provide misleading growth estimates to districts, schools and teachers that serve higher populations of these
SAS Global Forum 2013 is a couple weeks in the past, but the feedback and anticipation shared by customers as they heard about SAS 9.4 are still fresh in our minds here at SAS. As we put the final touches on the June release, the excitement we felt in San
The PharmaSUG 2013 conference in Chicago this week was awesome. From the perspective of graphics, there was great interest in using SG Procedures, Designer and GTL for building clinical graphs. It was nice to see many papers by users on how they are using these tools for creating graphs on a daily
A few months ago I released the Copy Files task for use with SAS Enterprise Guide. The task allows you to transfer any files between your PC and a SAS Workspace session, much like an FTP process. It doesn't rely on FTP though; it uses a combination of SAS code,
Are you an NFL fan, or curious about analyzing social media data? -- Well, in either case, this blog's for you! I recently read a fascinating Facebook article that included a U.S. county map showing which NFL (U.S. football) team had the most 'likes' in each county (based on ~35 million
What do you see when you look at the picture to the right? Like you, I see a busy dad with his daughter trying to maneuver a shopping cart full of groceries! But the real question: is there more? What do you really see? In a business setting, depending on
As we have seen my previous post "Seeing SAS data through metadata", there is a fundamental difference between accessing a SAS library using a physical reference or a metadata reference to that library. By now, you should now be an expert on the nuances of physical references to SAS data
Last week someone posted an interesting question to the SAS/IML Support Community. The problem involved four nested DO loops and took hours to run. By transforming several nested DO loops into an equivalent matrix operation, I was able to reduce the run time to about one second. The process of
A few weeks ago, we asked, "What would big data say if it could talk?" Today, we might ask, "What if big data had a mail cart?!" It's a fun metaphor that shows how overwhelming big data can be without a strategy for managing it. Watch the short video below
The annual conference in SAS Francisco is now a pleasant memory. And what a pleasant one it was! I saw so many of my user friends and met some new ones too. When I attend this conference I wear at least two hats. The first is that of a SAS
It seems like only yesterday that the SAS Executive Briefing Center (EBC) parking lot was filled with Craft Services tents, high-end luxury cars, movie cameras and, oh, a few celebrities. But, it’s been nearly a year since SAS became Stark Industries for a day when parts of Iron Man 3
Ever heard your grandmother say when you were little: If you have your heart set in the right place, you can achieve anything you set out to do! That’s what SAS users tried to do at SAS Global Forum 2013 held at Moscone West, San Francisco. The conference had a
I've conducted a lot of univariate analyses in SAS, yet I'm always surprised when the best way to carry out the analysis uses a SAS regression procedure. I always think, "This is a univariate analysis! Why am I using a regression procedure? Doesn't a regression require at least two variables?"
Do you remember when CPU time was a high-priced commodity? "Today, if you are any good at what you do, the constrained resource is you," says Timothy Berryhill from Wells Fargo. Berryhill has years of experience with SAS on "many platforms and operating systems." He says there are several things
The SAS Global Forum conference last week was awesome. From the perspective of graphics, there were more papers from uses on graphics and ODS graphics then in recent times. I will post a summary shortly. One of the interesting papers was "#113-2013 - Creating Clark Error Grid using SAS/GRAPH and Annotate..."
San Francisco! The Bay Area and Silicon Valley: innovation, the brightest minds, creating, inspiring new technology and style. This city is known for its healthy food choices. For example, I spotted a homeless man on my way from the Westin St. Francis to the Moscone Conference Center with this never-
I’m a geek at heart – I always have been and I always will be. I love technology and I love math. I love that my job combines both. But you know what is even better? In today’s world of big data and data visualization, it is totally fashionable to
As a boy growing up in the 1970s, I was fascinated in particular by dinosaurs. I knew all their names, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Diplodocus, Triceratops etc. And I could also remember in which geological time period they lived, and on which continent; and what they ate, often each other of course!
In today's fast-paced, jam-packed work day, many people answer email and read reports after business hours. And more and more, they're doing those things on a smartphone or tablet. How are your users accessing and using your reports? Statistics South Africa has found that their end-users would prefer a mobile
At a recent conference, I talked with a SAS customer who told me that he was using an R package to create a three-panel visualization of a distribution. Unfortunately, he couldn't remember the name of the package, and he has not returned my e-mails, so the purpose of today's article
Even though it's been around for well over a decade, SAS Enterprise Guide was still a hot topic among attendees at SAS Global Forum this year. In the Technology Connection -- the big session on Monday morning -- SAS R&D staff used the conference agenda content to demonstrate the power
A question was recently put to me by everyone’s favorite futurist – Thornton May: “Most people don't put innovation and infrastructure in the same sentence. They simply tend to view savings derived from optimized infrastructure as a funding source for “other” innovation investments. My thoughts?” My thoughts initially circled in
