I'm happy to announce a new SAS text analytics community (online forum)! The community is a centralized location for everyone using SAS text analytics, including those working with Text Miner, Enterprise/Content Categorization, Sentiment Analysis and Ontology Management. Join the community to: Discuss ideas. Ask questions. Seek peer assistance. Share areas
When I travel to San Francisco in April for SAS Global Forum 2013, it will make my 12th time to attend the international SAS users group conference, and my 7th consecutive year. A lot of people assume that I automatically go every year, but the truth is that SAS employees
I wanted to write a blog post about the "Table distribution" in SAS. The Table distribution, which is supported by the RAND and the RANDGEN function, enables you to specify the probability of selecting each of k items. Therefore you can use the Table distribution to sample, with replacement, from
How many analytical projects have foundered due to lack of problem definition and other soft skills? As my SAS colleague Sascha Schubert writes, people and process matter, in addition to great technology. Great technology is a great first step, but having the right people following the right process is critically important.
This technical case study by Faisal Dosani, Royal Bank of Canada; Lisa Eckler, Lisa Eckler Consulting Inc.; and Marje Fecht, Prowerk Consulting Ltd., discusses the steps to develop a hands-off process for creating flexible and extensible solutions that avoid maintainability issues and enable speed to market of results. Building reusable
We had some fierce wind storms all across the United States yesterday, which even spawned some tornadoes! It looks like we weathered the storm OK here in Cary (but I still need to run out to the lake and make sure my pontoon/houseboat is still there, agh!). Anyway ... as with other
In my previous article on Adverse Event Timeline Graph, I wrote about how to create the AE timeline using SAS 9.2 code, using VECTOR plot and the MARKERCHAR option in SCATTER plot. I described a better way to place the labels at the lower end of the vectors. SAS 9.3 provides an easier way
I've got a new trick that you can use to track progress in a long-running SAS program, while using SAS Enterprise Guide. I've previously written about the SYSECHO statement and how you can use it to update the Task Status window with custom messages. SYSECHO is a "global" statement in
Over the holidays I was having a discussion with my cat, Ms. Trixie Lou. A question that often arises during the first programming class is the following: how do I find the variables that are in common to these two or three data sets? As it turns out, Ms. Trixie
I think most people would agree that there's not much point in locking your front door if you're going to leave the keys in the lock. With a SAS platform metadata security implementation, it is just as important to ensure that the metadata access controls that you have carefully put
The SAS/IML language secretly creates temporary variables. Most of the time programmers aren't even aware that the language does this. However, there is one situation where if you don't think carefully about temporary variables, your program will silently produce an error. And as every programmer knows, silent wrong numbers are
Often it is desirable to use special Unicode characters for the tick value names on the axes. However, SG procedures and GTL do not support Unicode strings in SAS data sets. With SAS 9.3, the SGPLOT procedure supports annotation which does support Unicode strings. You can create an annotation data set
Windows 8 was officially released Friday October 26. This was Microsoft’s first operating system release since the introduction of Apple’s iPad and the subsequent surge in popularity of tablets. To align their OS with the new computing devices, Windows 8 has two interfaces to allow access from traditional desktops and laptops and
SAS has several kinds of special data sets whose contents are organized according to certain conventions. These special data sets are marked with the TYPE= data set attribute. For example, the CORR procedure can create a data set with the TYPE=CORR attribute. You can decipher the structure of the data
Last year I published an example application for searching your SAS Enterprise Guide project files (EGP files). The example shows off some of the cool features of the automation API, and it's a useful tool. As neat of an example as that was, it had some limitations. It worked only
Analytics is a key piece in nearly all 31 recommendations outlined in The Innovative DOT: A Handbook of Policy and Practice. Crafted by the State Smart Transportation Initiative, in partnership with Smart Growth America, the handbook provides 31 recommendations for state transportation officials looking for ways to increase efficiencies and
The traditional methods of making credit decisions relied mostly on human judgment; those have been replaced by methods that use statistical models. Today, statistical models are used not only for deciding whether to accept an applicant (application scoring), but also to predict the likelihood of defaults among customers who have
My team and I are often called on to help customers optimize SAS system performance, particularly when the root cause of performance problems is hard to track down. This is the first of a two-part article on practices and tools we’ve found most useful.
Super Bowl XLVII is almost here! Whether you’re a Ravens or a 49ers fan or just watching the game for the commercials, Super Bowl snacks always seem to take center field and are the true MVPs. According to an article from Huffington Post, Americans will eat nearly 11 million pounds
I like to be efficient in my SAS/IML programs, but sometimes I get into bad habits. Recently I realized that I was reshaping a bunch of SAS/IML row vectors because I wanted to write them to a SAS data set. This is completely unnecessary! The SAS/IML language will create a
A commonly requested graph is a bar chart with response and targets. With SAS 9.3, the SGPLOT procedure supports new "parametric" plot statements called HBARPARM and VBARPARM. These statements are special versions of the HBAR and VBAR statements and they expect summarized data for each category or category+group combination. Also,
It was a moonless night in April 1912 when the pinnacle of ocean travel technology and luxury, the RMS Titanic, collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,500 passengers and crew. A primary cause of the tragedy was that the captain and
Sometimes I need to "disassemble" a SAS data set into a DATA step program. It's kind of like creating a "freeze-dried" version of the data that you can carry around and use anywhere, re-hydrating it in the SAS session where you next need it. Some example uses for this: Build
Yea! My paper was accepted at the SAS Global Forum 2013. There’s nothing better than getting an email from your section chair saying your paper has been accepted. Steve Overton was correct in his The Wait is Killing Me post. Angela Hall and I were invited to conduct a Hands
SAS Technical Support has a wonderful how-to guide for using one set of prompt values across multiple sections of a Web Report Studio report. This works great in 4.2, however there is one additional item that I discovered in a 4.3/9.3 install. With the addition of PROC STP and SAS
A SAS/IML user on a discussion forum was trying to read data into a SAS/IML matrix, but the data was so large that it would not fit into memory. (Recall that SAS/IML matrices are kept in RAM.) After a few questions, it turned out that the user was trying to
Big data seemed like all of the other marketing hype that we hear. But as the months have gone by, it seems clear that everyone is dealing with big data. You know, data coming in so fast that you can't adequately analyze it (at least not as efficiently and quickly
SAS macro variables are a great way to store a calculated value, so you can use it later in your code. They are not just limited to the data step -- you can also use macro variables in title statements, axis statements, etc. By default, the macro variable will be padded with
I'm now into my 20th year of working for SAS. This year in November I'll have my 20th "SAS-iversary" and thus mark the beginning of my third decade here. I've worked here since the Clinton administration. I've met SAS employees who were actually not yet born when I attended my
Happy belated New Year! For what it’s worth, no, I am not calling you a “dummy” or writing this just for Chris Hemedinger– just wanted to get your attention. This blog is actually an introduction to a series that I am kicking off this year entitled: "It's all about the data…"
