My predictions for "big data" in 2013 were recently published in the Fourth Quarter 2012 issue of Loyalty Management Magazine, and I wanted to share them here too: Streaming data from gadgets, cars and other devices will become an even bigger and more important data source. Social data will be used
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…"
A while ago I saw a blog post on how to simulate Bernoulli outcomes when the probability of generating a 1 (success) varies from observation to observation. I've done this often in SAS, both in the DATA step and in the SAS/IML language. For example, when simulating data that satisfied
The guys of Stat Wars are battling it out again. This time they’re helping a viewer who needs to determine which stunt doubles to hire by predicting their performance using SAS. Watch and then vote on whether Danny Modlin or Marc Huber has the best solution for finding the right
According to Forbes, a comprehensive "big data" strategy is vital because without one your business will miss out on at least 71 million dollars a year! To me this means your "big data" strategy should be more focused on how best to derive value from your data instead of focusing
I'm always looking for ways to make my job sound more relevant to people who ask me, "so what does SAS do?" SAS does so much that I can't possibly list it all, so I need some umbrella terms that can capture the essence of it (and still keep the
Most people try to hide the evidence of their bad decisions. But this weekend I decided to share mine to social media. I hope that it's not a career-limiting move. Actually, I made quite a few good decisions as well, outnumbering the bad ones. Still, I had many missed opportunities,
Often we have the need to see the data by two different classifiers at the same time, as requested by a recent query on the SAS Communities page. In this example I have simulated a response over time for patients by study and treatment. We want to create series plots
When a categorical variable has dozens or hundreds of categories, it is often impractical and undesirable to create a bar chart that shows the counts for all categories. Two alternatives are popular: Display only the Top 10 or Top 20 categories. As I showed last week, to do this in
The increasing use of predictive analytics in mission-critical business decisions and operations brings new challenges to the forefront for many of our customers. Throughout the last year I spoke to many customers about their use of predictive analytics and where they see areas of improvement to achieve even more success
Anything that you do manually leaves the door open for error; this is especially true for your file system. Aside from that, automated processes are usually faster. Magnus Mengelbier has applied this philosophy to providing version control capabilities to SAS data sets, programs and outputs.
Being that 2013 is the International Year of Statistics, I wanted to make sure everyone knows how to handle my favorite statistic - percent (%) - in SAS! I often see data in spreadsheets/csv/etc that purport to represent "percents"... but you have to be a bit careful when working with
In version 4.3 of SAS BI Dashboard, data caching is not enabled by default. Each time a user opens a dashboard, each element on the dashboard executes a query to return the result. Enabling data caching can improve dashboard performance by generating data results in advance.
Sometimes a categorical variable has many levels, but you are only interested in displaying the levels that occur most frequently. For example, if you are interested in the number of times that a song was purchased on iTunes during the past week, you probably don't want a bar chart with
Happy 2013, it’s hard to believe another year has passed! New Year’s is typically a time for new beginnings and for many people New Year’s Resolutions. How many years have you vowed on January 1st to start eating healthier, lose weight, or hit the gym more? And how often have
I've bragged about how easy it is to install custom tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide. It's simple: you copy the .NET assembly (usually a single DLL file) into one of the designated folders in your SAS Enterprise Guide installation, and your task just shows up in the menu. Since I
The creation of Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) took off in 2009 with the establishment of the State Health Information Exchange Cooperative Agreement Program (SHIECAP). Recently, it seems like HIEs have been somewhat of the middle-child, garnering less attention between the health insurance exchanges and Medicaid expansion. But let’s take a
Don’t you just hate this: Every time you go to your favorite website or blog you have to login again? And, it does no good to simply keep the site open in your browser, because it logs you out for no activity. Well, don’t despair. We know what you want
