SESUG (Southeast SAS Users Group Conference) is an annual conference held in the Southeast US - typically in September or October. This year, the conference will be held at the Sheraton Imperial Hotel and Convention Center in Durham, North Carolina, October 14-16. According to Peter Eberhardt, SESUG 2012 Academic Chair, the
One of the first skills that a beginning SAS/IML programmer learns is how to read data from a SAS data set into SAS/IML vectors. (Alternatively, you can read data into a matrix). The beginner is sometimes confused about the syntax of the READ statement: do you specify the names of
Part of what captivated me about this paper and poster presentation were the presenters - these guys are high school kids using SAS to do a visual analysis of Internet use by high schoolers. The idea was so compelling that Anna Brown and Inside SAS Global Forum went to talk
The semester is coming to an end and summer break is just around the corner, so why should you be thinking about conferences and grant opportunities? Conferences like SESUG provide a lot of great benefits to students.
What tiny looking operator packs a mighty punch with large datasets? Your queries are big. Your reports span multiple columns. To top it all you have to summarize data in multiple ways. Are you tempted to throw in the towel? Do you feel like saying a firm “Can’t be done”
In a previous post I showed how you can use Windows PowerShell (with the SAS Local Data Provider) to create a SAS data set viewer. This approach doesn't require that you have SAS installed, and allows you to read or export the records within a SAS data set file. In
So, when you go to the game, do you buy a hot dog, a beer and a banner before the first quarter? Do you buy them all from the same vendor? Do you go back during the half? Does the score impact how much money you spend on concessions? All
When I was at SAS Global Forum last week, a SAS user asked my advice regarding a SAS/IML program that he wrote. One step of the program was taking too long to run and he wondered if I could suggest a way to speed it up. The long-running step was
Stanley Fogleman says that SAS can be hard to learn on your own - not because it is a difficult language - but because of the various business requirements. In fact, even college students entering the workforce are often ill-prepared in some ways. That's why Fogleman believes that a SAS mentoring program
With the rapid changes in our education systems regarding new standards, assessments, accountability and evaluation, teachers are rightfully feeling the pressure of being underprepared. The majority of teachers were not trained or certified with these rigorous systems in place. Recognizing that higher education institutions need to play an active role
At the 2012 SAS Global Forum, one of the questions from a user was about showing the original data used for the box plot. While you can use outliers in conjunction with the box features to get a feel for the data, for some situations you may need to see exactly
SAS already has some cool mobile Business Intelligence apps. Now, Scott McQuiggan tells Anna Brown, in this Inside SAS Global Forum interview, that you can view the really cool high-performance analytics reports that you've created on your desktop - right from your mobile device. Check this out!!
In statistical programming, I often test a program by running it on a problem for which I know the correct answer. I often use a single expression to compute the maximum value of the absolute difference between the vectors: maxDiff = max( abs( z-correct ) ); /* largest absolute difference
It is becoming more and more apparent that social media is a gold mine of unstructured data that is just waiting to be analysed so that the nuggets can be extracted. At SAS Global Forum, I was particularly impressed with the diversified use of sentiment analysis and the exploration that
Jenn Sykes (you probably remember her from this great sentiment analysis post last year about American Idol), presented Predicting Electoral Outcomes with SAS® Sentiment Analysis and SAS® Forecast Studio at SAS Global Forum 2012. In addition to predicting elections, Sykes tells Anna Brown from Inside SAS Global Forum, that there is a lot of unstructured data
A reader asked: I want to create a vector as follows. Suppose there are two given vectors x=[A B C] and f=[1 2 3]. Here f indicates the frequency vector. I hope to generate a vector c=[A B B C C C]. I am trying to use the REPEAT function
Recently I posted an article on this blog on how to create bar charts with log response axes in response to a question by a user. This generated some feedback suggesting that bar charts should not be used with log response axes or with a baseline of anything other than
According to Carlos André Reis Pinheiro, social networks in communications are easy to understand and detect, so Oi Telecommunications chose that route first when trying to detect fraud. Community detection for fraud proved to be somewhat different. It is a progressive search, from looking at the entire network to looking
A SAS user (who lives in the the US) emailed me a question about SAS functions. He was reading UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) datetime values from server logs, and to make future calculations and comparisons easier, he wanted to transform the value to local datetime. The INTNX() function worked great, but
Congratulations to all of you who presented at SAS Global Forum. It takes a lot of hard work to put together the research, write a paper and presentation, and then stand on stage and present to a crowd of people you have never met. You are amazing. From all of
If you have ever searched social media - Twitter, the blogsphere, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest - for your favorite topic (I'm guessing it's baby penguins or monster truck racing), then you know that it can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Imagine how law enforcement officers feel: They
To a statistician, the DIF function (which was introduced in SAS/IML 9.22) is useful for time series analysis. To a numerical analyst and a statistical programmer, the function has many other uses, including computing finite differences. The DIF function computes the difference between the original vector and a shifted version
Google's Chief Economist Hal Varian says the sexiest job of this decade will be statistician. Anna Brown interviewed George Hurley, a Senior Research Manager, to find out what the big deal is. Take a look at his answer and then tell me why you think being a statistician is the hot
Many SAS customers are quickly adopting 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows, and they are pleased-as-punch when they find a 64-bit version of SAS to run on it. They waste no time in deploying the new version, only to find that a few things don't work quite the same as they
Waynette is exhausted after everything she did at SAS Global Forum, so she asked me to write a blog post for her so she can take some time to rest up. ??? Hey, Waynette, like you think I’m a bundle of energy after chairing the event ??? I mean, I
Each time I attend the SAS Global Forum, I learn some tricks and this year was no different. Here're 4 tips that you might find useful for the conference next year and please leave yours in the Comments Section.
Last week I introduced this series. Today I begin to dive deeper into each of the four E's. First up? Enforcement. In 2009, there were 5.5 million police-reported traffic crashes. Law enforcement officers work diligently to prevent crashes by enforcing traffic safety laws pertaining to, among other things, seat belt
Now, we all know by now that I'm not a programmer (that makes me very sad sometimes and may frustrate some of you at times), but I know a good paper and presentation when I see one. Christopher Bost knows how to teach a topic. I went to his Tuesday
To a statistician, the LAG function (which was introduced in SAS/IML 9.22) is useful for time series analysis. To a numerical analyst and a statistical programmer, the function provides a convenient way to compute quantitites that involve adjacent values in any vector. The LAG function is essentially a "shift operator."
Getting the axis values just right generally requires some work, and the values you want can change from case to case. One such example was discussed by Dan Heath in his post on custom axis values. Here Dan shows the usage of non uniform axis values using the VALUES option on
