Here at SAS Publishing, we’ve started the new year off with a bang, particularly when it comes to conferences. We’re attending a number of new shows in addition to the usual lineup this year. Visit our booth, meet our authors, check out our new and forthcoming titles, and talk with
Are you a SAS professional working in the insurance or financial services industry? Are you looking for a place where you can talk with others who work in the those industries? Would you like to get together and network, face-to-face, or share ideas and best practices for using SAS? There is now a SAS Users Group just for you;
The SAS/IML READ statement has a few convenient features for reading data from SAS data sets. One is that you can read all variables into vectors of the same names by using the _ALL_ keyword. The following DATA steps create a data set called Mixed that contains three numeric and
Often it is useful to view multiple responses by a common independent variable all in the same plot. SGPLOT procedure and GTL support the ability to view two responses, one each on the Y and Y2 axes by one independent variable (X) in one graph. Yes, you can also have X
In the Star Wars movie, Obi-wan could just wave his hand, mutter a few words, and the stormtroopers would "move along". How the power of the Force makes ridding yourself of problematic characters so much easier! I recently was invited to become an alternate instructor for Ron Cody’s SAS Business
It's Friday the 13. That can conjure up all kinds of scary thoughts, or you might consider it a lucky day. Which is it for you? This SAS user doesn't rely on luck or chance with his or her important projects. SAS is used to predict failures and outages!
A recent question on a SAS Discussion Forum was "how can you overlay multiple kernel density estimates on a single plot?" There are three ways to do this, depending on your goals and objectives. Overlay different estimates of the same variable Sometimes you have a single variable and want to
It is "well known" that the pairwise deletion of missing values and the resulting computation of correlations can lead to problems in statistical computing. I have previously written about this phenomenon in my article "When is a correlation matrix not a correlation matrix." Specifically, consider the symmetric array whose elements
A’s in the front, Z’s in the back. How many of us grew up sitting in alphabetical order next to the same few classmates throughout school? While this is a quick and efficient way to learn student names, which is no easy task, it is not the most effective way
You know the old joke about the guy who jumps into a taxi and asks the driver, “Do you know how to get to Carnegie Hall?” and the driver replies, “Practice, practice, practice”. Well SAS OnDemand may not be your ticket to Carnegie Hall but it’s a great practice environment
Recently a user posted a question on the SAS/GRAPH and ODS Graphics Forum about drawing a plot with custom confidence intervals . The user has a simple data set with category, response (mean) and custom lower and upper confidence intervals. The data looks like this: Robert Allison provided the code (proc gplot +
Before there was CNN or FOX News, people used to get their news from SAS. At least, that's how I imagine that people kept themselves informed. What else can explain the existence of the NEWS= system option, which helps SAS admins to surface the must-know information to the SAS community?
I'm about to give you the single-most valuable piece of advice for getting the most out of your experience at SAS Global Forum 2012.
In my article on Buffon's needle experiment, I showed a graph that converges fairly nicely and regularly to the value π, which is the value that the simulation is trying to estimate. This graph is, indeed, a typical graph, as you can verify by running the simulation yourself. However, notice
Dear Miss SAS Answers, In PROC REPORT can I use one calculated (computed) variable in the calculation of another computed variable? In the example below, I’m trying to use the value of the Bonus column to calculate the Total column: compute Bonus; Bonus =sal.sum*0.05; endcomp; compute Total; total=sum(sal.sum, Bonus.sum); endcomp;
During one week in December, two separate transportation agencies within the federal government made two major announcements. First, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) – the government agency responsible for guiding traffic safety initiatives on the nation’s highways announced that crash fatalities had declined to record low rates. Just
For 25 years, winners of sporting events, singing competitions and beauty pageants have been spouting the same response when asked, “What’s next?” Their simple answer - “I’m going to Disney World!” - makes us all jealous.
A recent post on the SAS website shows the SAS Annual Revenue History. It would be interesting to see how we could create such a graph using SG procedures, and how we could add more information and interest in the presentation. So, I started with the basic informaiton on the annual revenues provided,
In the R programming language, you can use a negative index in order to exclude an element from a list or a row from a matrix. For example, the syntax x[-1] means "all elements of x except for the first." In general, if v is a vector of indices to
If you live in the US, do you remember the Dunkin Donuts commercial from about 30 years ago. It opens with a devoted donut maker climbing out of bed, saying "It's time to make the donuts." (Donut makers have to get up early so that you and I can have
Following up on the theme of graphs commonly used in many applications, here is another one that displays a horizontal bar chart with multiple data columns aligned with the bars. Recently at WUSS, a user stopped by asking how to create just such a graph. While this user wanted something more complex
Buffon's needle experiment for estimating π is a classical example of using an experiment (or a simulation) to estimate a probability. This example is presented in many books on statistical simulation and is famous enough that Brian Ripley in his book Stochastic Simulation states that the problem is "well known
In the immortal words of Britney Spears: Oops! I did it again. At least, I'm afraid that I did. I think I might have helped a SAS student with a homework assignment, or perhaps provided an answer in preparation for a SAS certification exam. Or maybe it was a legitimate
SAS Publishing is pleased to announce that both the Base and the Advanced SAS Certification Prep Guides are now available as eBooks in the Apple iBookstore. In these guides, you’ll find affordable self-study materials to help you prepare for the SAS® 9 exams. Prepare yourself to achieve certification using your favorite
Happy New Year, everyone! It’s that wonderful time of the year when people start anew and we all start making promises to ourselves about the things we want to accomplish in the year ahead. If you’re looking for some ways to ramp up your personal and professional expertise this year,
Local governments are not immune to the rising demand for more accountability in government run services and programs, and the expenditure of public funds. Elected officials and citizens alike want to know what these programs accomplish for the public investment made. To date, the response to these questions and demands has been
Let us ring in the new year with something simple and useful. A recent question by a user over the holidays motivated this article on what is likely a commonly used graph. We want to compare the preformance of two categories along with a third measure. This could be something like "How
Hello, 2012! It's a New Year and I'm flushed with ideas for new blog articles. (You can also read about The DO Loop's most popular posts of 2011.) The fundamental purpose of my blog is to present tips and techniques for writing efficient statistical programs in SAS. I pledge to
Today, every organization is running on too few resources - getting it done with fewer people, a reduced budget and less time. Grid computing enables SAS to automatically use a centrally managed grid infrastructure to achieve workload balancing, high availability and parallel processing. Do what once took days in minutes
At the beginning of 2011, I made four New Year's resolutions for my blog. As the year draws to a close, it's time to see how I did: Resolution: 100 blog posts in 2011: Completed. I blew by this goal by posting 165 articles. I recently compiled a list of
