The American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials recently released a top 10 list of transportation issues that will be “talked, written or tweeted and legislated about” in 2012. As expected, funding constraints and Congressional action on reauthorization appear on the list but the group also notes that natural disaster
Unlike prior versions of SAS OLAP technology, 9.2 provides more options for maintaining and refreshing OLAP cubes. With this comes some discussion about what each one does alone, and how pairing these techniques really provides SAS OLAP Server Administrators and cube developers a cornucopia of OLAP options. PROC OLAPOPERATE Remember
Here is the second installment of sample graphs from the SG Procedures book - The Adverse Event Timeline. This is a graph commonly used in patient profiles for clinical trials where we track the progress of a patient through a hospitalization event, tracking the dates and severity of the adverse events. The
A variance-covariance matrix expresses linear relationships between variables. Given the covariances between variables, did you know that you can write down an invertible linear transformation that "uncorrelates" the variables? Conversely, you can transform a set of uncorrelated variables into variables with given covariances. The transformation that works this magic is
Have you ever wanted to run a sample program from the SAS documentation or wanted to use a data set that appears in the SAS documentation? You can: all programs and data sets in the documentation are distributed with SAS, you just have to know where to look! Sample data
Recently a user posted a question on the SAS/GRAPH and ODS Graphics Communities page on how to plot the normal density curves for two classification levels in the same graph. We have often seen examples of a distribution plot of one variable using a histogram with normal and kernel density curves. Here is a simple example: Code Snippet:
Sara started it, and I like the idea - the Unofficial Official Guide to SAS Global Forum. My contribution to this unofficial guide is “The Agenda Builder and why it matters to me." In case you're wondering, I use it to:
My colleague, Steve Serrao, just published a blog post on the proliferation of varied law enforcement approaches and their related phraseologies. After reading, I concur – hence, this blog’s title. I am not a huge fan of the term “predictive policing”. While others may love it and live it, and
We call it the "metadata profile", but really it's like a telephone number that connects you to your SAS environment. Just as a telephone number has component parts (country code, area code, exchange), the metadata profile contains information that allow you to "dial in" to your SAS servers. This information
In two previous blog posts I worked through examples in the survey article, "Robust statistics for outlier detection," by Peter Rousseeuw and Mia Hubert. Robust estimates of location in a univariate setting are well-known, with the median statistic being the classical example. Robust estimates of scale are less well-known, with
In December of last year, the book "Statistical Graphics Procedures by Example" co-authored by Dan Heath and I was published. On the back cover, it proclaims "Free Code on the Web". Now, who can resist such an offer? Since most of the examples in the book have very short syntax,
Everyone is looking for a bargain, especially those traveling with their families to Orlando for SAS Global Forum. Orlando is the land of theme parks and attractions, many with hefty ticket prices. Since I am heading to Orlando in April myself, I have been doing quite a lot of research.
The other day I encountered the following SAS DATA step for generating three normally distributed variables. Study it, and see if you can discover what is unnecessary (and misleading!) about this program: data points; drop i; do i=1 to 10; x=rannor(34343); y=rannor(12345); z=rannor(54321); output; end; run; The program creates the
Recently, I had a discussion with a user concerning the volume of imagemap data generated for an interactive, web-based visual contain a large number of graphs. The large amount of imagemap data was causing problems with the current version of their web browser. The graphs consisted of either bar charts
So many of us struggle with this mountain. In fact, 68.27% of us get within sight of reaching the summit (while 95.47% of us are at least on a perceivable slope). We run, walk, crawl and sometimes slide our way uphill (from one direction or the other) until we finally
What is surface complexation? Everyday I have to look something up on Google or in the dictionary. For example, do you know what a Cthulhu is? I had to search for that term after I tweeted that I thought a SAS surface plot graph was beautiful. Mike Nemecek from SAS
In a previous blog post on robust estimation of location, I worked through some of the examples in the survey article, "Robust statistics for outlier detection," by Peter Rousseeuw and Mia Hubert. I showed that SAS/IML software and PROC UNIVARIATE both support the robust estimators of location that are mentioned
Here are a couple of bar charts showing the city mileage of cars by Type and Origin using the SGPLOT procedure from the sashelp.cars dataset. title 'Vehicle Mileage by Type'; proc sgplot data=cars; format mpg_city 4.1; vbar type / response=mpg_city stat=mean datalabel; xaxis display=(nolabel); run; title 'Counts by Country'; proc sgplot
Note: as this is a popular topic, I've added a few notes with minor updates, including a link to a popular how-to tutorial video. In case you missed it, the first maintenance release for SAS 9.3 was recently released. Because we're all friends here, you may call it "SAS 9.3M1"
I was on vacation when a family member sidled up to me. "Rick, you're a statistician..." he began. I knew I was in trouble. He proceeded to tell me the story of Joseph "Newsboy" Moriarty, a New Jersey mobster who rose to prominence and became known as the bookie who
The single most costly employee benefit for any organization is health insurance, and the price is going up. From 2003-2009, the costs per hour worked for employee health insurance increased from $1.03 to $2.00. These costs continue to increase from 5%-7% per year. The reality is that employee health insurance costs will continue
Many cities and counties are taking the lead of private industry and developing 311 call centers to consolidate incoming calls for service and information requests from citizens. The business advantages are clear: Citizens have one number to call for service and information rather than having to waste time searching for
All too often an unspeakable tragedy leads to a needed policy or operational change through a newly-realized criminal justice system gap. While we continually work to minimize existing gaps, the reality is that as law enforcement evolves, so does the crime and so do the criminals. In recognition of those
SAS Global Forum 2012 is just around the corner, and even those who have attended for the past 36 years need guidance in what to do and see. I thought it might be good to create a little users guide for the event: A blog series that will showcase some
Recently we discussed the features of the Shiller Graph, showing long term housing values in the USA. To understand the features necesary in the SGPLOT procedure to create such graph easily, it was useful to see how far we can go using GTL as released with SAS 9.2(M3). I got the data Shiller Housing index data
Statistical programmers often need mathematical constants such as π (3.14159...) and e (2.71828...). Programmers of numerical algorithms often need to know machine-specific constants such as the machine precision constant (2.22E-16 on my Windows PC) or the largest representable double-precision value (1.798E308 on my Windows PC). Some computer languages build these
Churn is a huge concern for insurers, credit card providers and telecommunications companies - even utilities. This Post-It Note author says that his company has found a way to reduce customer turnover - churn - by 10 percent using SAS Data Miner.
I encountered a wonderful survey article, "Robust statistics for outlier detection," by Peter Rousseeuw and Mia Hubert. Not only are the authors major contributors to the field of robust estimation, but the article is short and very readable. This blog post walks through the examples in the paper and shows
This morning I logged onto my e-mail at 6:45 AM to learn that SAS was ranked as the No. 3 Best Company to Work For. No. 3 is not as high as No. 1. But it's very, very close. Perhaps even barely distinguishable, in the larger scheme of things. I
An issue that SAS/GRAPH users have wrestled with in the past has been how to put tick marks at irregular intervals on their axes. In PROC GPLOT, if you specify irregular intervals using the ORDER option on the AXIS statement, the procedure’s axis kicks into a “discrete” mode, where the
