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
I am pleased to announce that this year at SAS Global Forum 2013 (San Francisco, April 27 to May 1, 2013) I am giving a free hands-on workshop (HOW) entitled "Getting Started with the SAS/IML Language." If you are not familiar with the very popular Hands-On Workshop series at SAS
OK, I promise this is the last article on Forest Plots (at least for a while). In the previous article on Subgrouped Forest Plot with Font Attributes, I discussed how to use bold text for subgroup headings. I mentioned that increasing the font size would not work as it would
Just a few days ago our "super-duper tech support trooper" called in asking for the link to the subgrouped Forest Plot with bold headings. She was referring to this Forest Plot with Subgroups I had posted earlier. However, as you can see, while the subgroup values are indented from the subgroup headers, the headers
Many of my blogging colleagues are taking this week to reflect on their top posts in 2012. Some are using the visitor statistics to rank the posts, but as Andy Ratcliffe points out, that gives short-shrift to the late-season articles. This year, I'm going to use this space to recap
In the spirit of the new year – the International Year of Statistics – I thought I’d share some different ways to use statistics. Can statistics help you in your everyday life? Certainly! And here's an example to prove it... Let's say you have a dresser drawer full of white socks.
It's the start of a new year. Have you made a resolution to be a better data analyst? A better SAS statistical programmer? To learn more about multivariate statistics? What better way to start the New Year than to read (or re-read!) the top 12 articles for statistical programmers from
Look at what arrived in the mail room this morning! Of course, I was expecting it sometime in January...but not first thing! Here's to early deliveries...perhaps this will set the tone for all of my projects in the new year.
In part 1 of my thoughts about analytics maturity, I deferred talking about issues related to the actual assessment of your organization’s level. Today I intend to detail some of the ways my peers and I are thinking about analytical maturity, comment on scales in use today, and address some
We decided to take a look back at our blogs in 2012 and see what piqued the interest of our readers. We had a little bit of everything from tricks to advice on all things SAS. Here’s the list of the Top 10 Blogs from 2012. Enjoy reading them again
Happy New Year! If you have “adopting SAS metadata” as one of your New Year’s resolutions, I’m here to help you! In my last post in the metadata series, I shared with you all of the reasons why I love SAS metadata. I’d like to kick off 2013 with helping
In this final post for 2012, I would like to finish up the panel sorting topic with a discussion on sorting the panel cells by statistic. With this sort, the response or dependent data in each cell is calculated down to a single statistic value (mean or median, for example). These values are
I recently published a post based on an InformationWeek article about the need for more analytic talent and tips for finding the right talent. InformationWeek failed to include information about using SAS to uncover fraudulent responses in applications. This Post-It Note author uses SAS for that and entertainment.
Two weeks ago SAS hosted over 20 users group leaders from across the US and Canada for our annual Users Group Summit. The purpose of the summit is to plan for 2013 conferences, and one of those in attendance was Craig Brelage, academic co-chair for PharmaSUG. It was a great opportunity
SAS programmers will immediately recognize the importance of reviewing the SAS log to provide insights into what’s going in a SAS program. As a SAS Administrator, however, you rarely have the luxury of being able to sit down with a cup of coffee and read through the server logs to
