PROC STP is a new procedure for SAS 9.3 Stored Processes. It's so new and different that I have not had the opportunity to use it yet in a customer engagement. When writing about it for the now released "The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes" book, I had
Because the SAS/IML language is a general purpose programming language, it doesn't have a BY statement like most other SAS procedures (such as PROC REG). However, there are several ways to loop over categorical variables and perform an analysis on the observations in each category. One way is to use
Recently, a user asked about creating a Bar Chart of Value by Date, where the dates are displayed on a scaled interval axis. Consider this simulated data set of value by date and treatment shown below. This data set only has one value for each date and treatment combination. We can use the VBAR statement
You could easily become overwhelmed by the number of presentations available at SAS Global Forum. But the savvy SAS Global Forum attendee knows how to select the most suitable sessions in a snap. How?
Watch live streaming video from sasglobalforum2012 at livestream.com I have 8 days before I board my plane for Orlando; 9 days until SAS Global Forum officially kicks off with Opening Session; 10 days before the first official mixer with all of my SAS friends; 11 days before the Kickback party,
Today, I have truly taken a chapter from the book - perhaps in more ways than one. I happened to notice that Art Carpenter's most recent book is titled, "Carpenter's Guide to Innovative SAS Techniques." Of course, you know that linking innovation and SAS are going to be a trigger
In about 30 lines of PowerShell script, we can build a SAS data set viewer that: Does not require SAS on the PC Provides very basic filtering capability Also allows for easy export to CSV All you need is the ability to run PowerShell scripts, and the SAS Local Data
[cue movie trailer voiceover guy] In a world where tabular data is too difficult to read and interpret, an unlikely hero is born. A small chart learns how to share BIG meaning. From humble beginnings as a SAS macro, SPARKY changed the world.
Last week I discussed how to fit a Poisson distribution to data. The technique, which involves using the GENMOD procedure, produces a table of some goodness-of-fit statistics, but I find it useful to also produce a graph that indicates the goodness of fit. For continuous distributions, the quantile-quantile (Q-Q) plot
I'm sorry to say that there will be no "Dummies around Me" smart phone app for SAS Global Forum this year. That means that if you want to catch up with me, you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way: plan to be in the same place that I am,
The bookstore is a happening place at SAS Global Forum. You can shop onsite and save money on books, mingle with 30+ SAS authors, try to win giveaways (hint: follow @SASPublishing on Twitter and monitor the SAS Global Forum hashtag #SASGF12 and/or enter a couple of surveys) and chat with
Chances are you have at least one paper or research project this semester. If you are using SAS as part of a project, there are some great student scholarship opportunities to allow you to attend a SAS users group conference this year. You can present your work and build your
Last week I blogged about how to construct a smoother for a time series for the temperature in Albany, NY from 1995 to March, 2012. I smoothed the data by "folding" the time series into a single "year" that contains repeated measurements for each day of the year. Experts in
Unofficial Official Guide to SAS Global Forum – What Not to Wear Part 2 Who knew ... geeks are chic? At least SAS geeks are chic! Due to the overwhelming response to the last post on the Unofficial Official Guide to SAS Global Forum - What not to Wear I thought
A recent article in the SAS and R blog was about current winter temperatures in Albany, NY. The temperature data for the recent winter (Dec 2011 - Mar 2012) was plotted on a polar graph. Robert Allison posted an article on displaying the same data as a Polar Graph using SAS/GRAPH . Here is his
The birthday matching problem is a classic problem in probability theory. The part of it that people tend to remember is that in a room of 23 people, there is greater than 50% chance that two people in the room share a birthday. But the birthday matching problem is also
A small, North American marketing firm (a division of a much larger international firm that provides data-driven, multichannel marketing solutions) provides its clients with "effective one-to-one marketing and ROI-focused strategies by applying advanced predictive analytics."
In yesterday's post, I discussed a "quick and dirty" method to smooth periodic data. However, after I smoothed the data I remarked that the smoother itself was not exactly periodic. At the end points of the periodic interval, the smoother did not have equal slopes and the method does not
Over at the SAS and R blog, Ken Kleinman discussed using polar coordinates to plot time series data for multiple years. The time series plot was reproduced in SAS by my colleague Robert Allison. The idea of plotting periodic data on a circle is not new. In fact it goes
Celebrating anniversaries is part of our culture. We celebrate the important ones – like 50 years of marriage – and the difficult ones, like going a week without chocolate. Parents celebrate the number of times a toddler uses the potty, and teenagers celebrate the weeks they have been dating. Big
Over at the SAS Discussion Forums, someone asked how to use SAS to fit a Poisson distribution to data. The questioner asked how to fit the distribution but also how to overlay the fitted density on the data and to create a quantile-quantile (Q-Q) plot. The questioner mentioned that the
In September 2010, I questioned whether you should care about native 64-bit client applications (or the lack thereof). At the time, SAS did not have a 64-bit version of SAS Enterprise Guide or SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. A skeptical reader might assume that I was just trying to make
When I first attended SAS Global Forum, you had to wait until you arrived at the conference to get connected with other attendees. There wasn’t a good way to find out in advance who was going to attend or what they were interested in. And if you weren’t attending for
Locating missing values is important in statistical data analysis. I've previously written about how to count the number of missing values for each variable in a data set. In Base SAS, I showed how to use the MEANS or FREQ procedures to count missing values. In the SAS/IML language, I
A user recently posted a question in the SAS communities forum about how to best display two measures by one classifier using a Bar-Line graph, where the scale of the two measures is vastly different. This got me thinking about various different ways to represent such data. Here are some of my thoughts,
Today, SAS announces a new addition to its global certification program: you can now become "SAS Versions"-certified. Over the past 36 years, SAS has delivered hundreds of software products to the business analytics marketplace. Each of those products has a version number. As new revisions are released, the combination of
A 23-year Harvard and Columbia University study was recently published shedding new light on the long-term impacts of teachers with both high and low value-added estimates. Researchers Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff tracked math and reading assessment data on over 2.5 million students from 1989-2009. They then incorporated 90% of these
The topic of cluster groups comes up often. By cluster group I am referring to the feature in bar charts where the group values are displayed side by side. With SAS 9.3, SG Procedures support stack or cluster grouping for Bar Charts and overlay or cluster grouping for all other
There may be some of you who don't remember this song, but in high school and early college it was one of my favorites. "Get a haircut and get a real job," by George Thorogood and the Destroyers, really spoke to the rebel in me. Most of my rebellious days are behind
In a previous post I showed how to implement Stewart's (1980) algorithm for generating random orthogonal matrices in SAS/IML software. By using the algorithm, it is easy to generate a random matrix that contains a specified set of eigenvalues. If D = diag(λ1, ..., λp) is a diagonal matrix and
