One of the often-cited side effects of moving from "Base SAS" (SAS on your PC, or Display Manager) to SAS Enterprise Guide is the loss of "X" command privileges -- that is, the ability for your SAS programs to invoke other programs via the operating system shell. We call this
A super hot topic in most organizations is how to make the most of the troves of social data available. This Post-It Note author isn't specific about the SAS solution that is being used, so I'm going to speculate that he or she is taking advantage of SAS Text Miner, SAS Text
Wondering why technology is such a big deal and why working with SAS will be in demand forever? The great blackout of Toronto in 2003 proved that so well. We could barely survive without electricity for a whole day. While breakdowns make us acutely aware of our dependence, technology also
Here at the Analytic Hospitality Executive, we are often asked the question “How is price optimization different from revenue management?” It’s a simple question that has become increasingly difficult to answer – largely due to the evolution of revenue management practices, and the very definition of revenue management. In this
I follow Andrew Ratcliff's NOTE: blog, and thought you might want to check out his latest post. I've reprinted it below (you'll notice that I'm a bit behind the times): NOTE: SGF Call for Papers 2013 Opens Tomorrow #sasgf13 The Call for Papers for next year's SAS Global Forum (SGF) opens
Magic squares are cool. Algorithms that create magic squares are even cooler. You probably remember magic squares from your childhood: they are n x n matrices that contain the numbers 1,2,...,n2 and for which the row sum, column sum, and the sum of both diagonals are the same value. There are many
For Insurers, social media is no longer just for marketing. As Hurricane Isaac threatens in the Gulf of Mexico, many proactive insurance companies are using social media to communicate with customers; offering insight on preparing for the storm, tracking the radar, and offering instructions on how to file a storm-related
Have you ever tried to put something on the Web, and then it looks different for other people (or maybe doesn't work at all)? ... And you eventually found that it was because they were using a different browser? That's one of the reasons I like traditional SAS/Graph output -- it's simple
“Ohio links teacher pay to test scores” was the headline of a recent CNN School of Thought blog. Yikes! With a headline like that, teachers might start heading for the hills. I kept reading through the blog hoping that it would better explain Ohio’s policy to use student growth data
When I studied math in school, I learned that the expression a (mod n) is always an integer between 0 and q – 1 for integer values of a and q. It's a nice convention, but SAS and many other computer languages allow the result to be negative if a (or q) is
Pie charts have been the subject of some criticism when they are used to compare measures across multiple categories. It is generally accepted that comparison of magnitudes represented as angular measures from varying baselines is not effective. However here are some use cases where a pie chart does quite well. When it comes
My colleague Matt Fulk and I were looking for a follow up to our white paper, Lead Management Automation Using SAS, which covered our evolution with marketing analytics. One initiative that has really been rewarding to work on has been the internal implementation of our Customer Experience Analytics solution. For me,
It's always great to hear that SAS users get to thump their chests a bit around statisticians and programmers who are struggling because they are trying to solve problems using software provided by those "other" companies. Now, that's inspiring.
Here's what usually happens: You attend a conference and decide to live blog a session or two. You might even pre-draft or pre-research a small portion of the post to include the names of the speakers and some background information about them. Typically, you start the post like this: I
As a trainer for SAS Education Australia and chairperson of the local SAS User Group, QUEST (Queensland Users Exploring SAS Technology) , I meet many new SAS users over the years. In July 2011, I met Kim MacKenzie, a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia at an Enterprise
Regular expressions provide a powerful method to find patterns in a string of text. However, the syntax for regular expressions is somewhat cryptic and difficult to devise. This is why, by my reckoning, approximately 97% of the regular expressions used in code today were copied and pasted from somewhere else.
Here’s the thing, if you are a small or midsize business, you realize (better than anyone) how there is really nothing small or midsize about what you do. It is simply business ... and just like with all the Fortune 500 monster companies out there, you face the same dilemmas
The other day I was using PROC SGPLOT to create a box plot and I ran a program that was similar to the following: proc sgplot data=sashelp.cars; title "Box Plot: Category = Origin"; vbox Horsepower / category=origin; run; An hour or so later I had a need for another box
Facebook has millions of users, and therefore when people share an interesting graph on Facebook it can "go viral" and millions of people might see it. Some of the graphs are obviously a bit biased - especially ones that are trying to sway your opinion one way or another on a topic
The next meeting of the Toronto Area SAS Society (TASS) will be at 8:30 am, Friday September 14th, 2012, at SAS Canada (280 King Street East, Toronto, Ontario). The meeting is really two meetings in one
The SAS/IML language supports user-defined functions (also called modules). Many SAS/IML programmers know that you can use the RETURN function to return a value from a user-defined function. For example, the following function returns the sum of each column of matrix: proc iml; start ColSum(M); return( M[+, ] ); /*
In case you've missed it, our friends from Down Under have written some great posts about customer intelligence on our sister blog, Left of the Date Line. Each one of our colleagues have a few posts, so here is a summary of my favorites, which I encourage you to read:
The Scatter Plot Matrix is a great tool that provides a quick visual of potential associations between variables. This may provide the analyst some hints on how to proceed with the analysis. Matrix of lab values for liver function tests are commonly used in clinical research. The SGSCATTER procedure provides an easy way
We have experimented with Twitter chats here at SAS, including a lively #statchat that we hosted two years ago for World Statistics Day. Likewise, our publications team has hosted a few fun Twitter chats with SAS book authors. Outside of SAS sponsored chats, I've also participated in and really enjoyed watching
It is common to want to extract the lower or upper triangular elements of a matrix. For example, if you have a correlation matrix, the lower triangular elements are the nontrivial correlations between variables in your data. As I've written before, you can use the VECH function to extract the
Every summer, SAS hires interns from colleges across the US. Now, I've worked at other organizations, and I've worked with interns before. These guys are brilliant - the rising stars of industry. This year, one of the summer interns is Dylan Sweetwood. He'll be returning to Stanford in the fall,
It should be no surprise that our marketing department here at SAS has a strong culture of measurement and accountability. As a result, it should shock nobody that we actually use our own customer intelligence solutions to help achieve our continuous improvement. My colleague, Matt Fulk, heads up the team that has been
The project that I'm currently working on requires several input data tables, and those tables must have a specific schema. That is, each input table must contain columns of a specific name, type, and length in order for the rest of the system to function correctly. The schema requirements aren't
Recently, there has been lot of uproar and confusion about the Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. Many were surprised by the ruling, and others, while happy it was upheld, are concerned about the constitutional questions that arose due to the way the ruling was
I'm working on a SAS programming project with a large team. Each team member is responsible for a piece of the overall system, and the "contract" for how it all fits together is The Data. For example, I've got a piece that performs some data manipulation and produces several output
