Here's a quick tip to keep in mind when you write SAS/IML programs: although the SAS/IML documentation lists about 300 functions that are built into the SAS/IML language, you can also call hundreds of functions in Base SAS. Furthermore, you can pass in SAS/IML vectors for arguments to the functions.
If you’ve taken one of my SAS classes you may recall “Mark’s 3 rules of programming”, the first of which is “Lazy programmers are GOOD programmers.” One of the things I love about best about SAS programming is the plethora of functions and shortcuts built into the language, all designed
Halloween night was rainy, so many fewer kids knocked on the door than usual. Consequently, I'm left with a big bucket of undistributed candy. One evening as I treated myself to a mouthful of tooth decay, I chanced to open a package of Wonka® Bottle Caps. The package contained three
Rick Wicklin's blog post on using abbreviations provided a solution for a long standing pain. When writing a new GTL program for simple graph, often the bulk of the code is boiler plate. To create a simple scatter plot of weight by height, you need to type in the following program:
Rick posted a tip today about using abbreviations in the SAS program editor window (often referred to as the "enhanced editor"). Defining abbreviations is a great way to save keystrokes and re-use "templates" of code that you've squirreled away. (One of Rick's readers also picked up on the tip, and
In this blog we will discuss many aspects of the SG Procedures. This article will cover some basic features and workings of the SGPLOT procedure to establish a baseline. The single-cell graph is the work horse for data visualization. From the simple bar chart to the complex patient profiles for clinical
I recently attended The Education Trust’s 2011 National Conference on closing gaps and raising achievement for ALL students. This was my first Ed Trust event and I walked away baffled by the data about the inequities in our education system, and the persistent gaps between the affluent and impoverished. First,
When I moved last year from Denver to the Washington, DC area people told me to prepare myself for the long hours I would spend in my car. I had no idea. It takes forever to get anywhere. Once, during a snowstorm it took me 9 hours to drive 10
Did you know that you can define "abbreviations" in the SAS enhanced editor? These handy little shortcuts can save you a lot of typing. For example, I have an abbreviation for the string _iml. Whenever I type _iml, the editor prompts me to replace those four characters with the following
Here is a little trick to file away. Given a row vector of zeros and ones, thought of as representing a number in base 2, the following SAS/IML statements compute the decimal value of that vector. proc iml; x = {1 0 0 1 1 1}; /* number in base
I've been working with date-time data on a recent project, and I've come across a few SAS programs that have "opportunity for improvement" when it comes time to create reports. (Or maybe I haven't, and I contrived this entire blog post so that I could reference one of my favorite
SAS said, "Hello, San Francisco!" for the Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS) conference October 12-14. The conference was chaired by Kathy Valdes, from SRI, and Ginger Carey, from Carey Consulting, two long time SAS users. With no time for Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay, we kicked off the event -
One aspect of blogging that I enjoy is getting feedback from readers. Usually I get statistical or programming questions, but every so often I receive a comment from someone who stumbled across a blog post by way of an internet search. This morning I received the following delightful comment on
The Unicode character table contains a vast array of characters and symbols that can be quite useful for making your text more descriptive in your graph. These characters can be inserted into any viewable string that you can define in the GTL or SG procedure syntax. These strings include titles,
If you want to extract values from a SAS/IML vector, use the subscripting operation, such as in the following example: proc iml; x = {A B C D E}; y = x[{1 2 3}]; /* {A,B,C} */ The vector y contains the first three elements of x. However, did you
The display of statistics, aligned with graphical plot of the data, is a common requirement for graphs, especially in the Clinical Research domain. In the previous post on Discrete Offset, I used an example of the Lipid Profile graph. Now, let us use the same example and add the display of statistics in
You can still get a paper proposal in for SAS Global Forum 2012. All you need is an idea. And probably some data. And also, some techniques for analyzing that data. Oh, and some conclusions would be helpful as well. I know: you are a busy person! You might not
~Contributed by Martin L. Olesen I began using SAS 6.04 in 1992 for my own projects and as a teaching assistant. Professionally, I have worked in SAS since 1997, after graduation. I use Base SAS, SAS/STAT and SAS/OR. I work in an Icelandic bank doing credit risk analysis and rating
Sometimes you want to label only certain observations in a plot. This is useful in many ways, but one use is to label outliers on a scatter plot. In the SGPLOT procedure, the DATALABEL= option enables you to specify the name of a variable that is used to label observations.
Often we have the need to display multiple columns of data in a graph, and we want to introduce some separation into their placement in the graph. Or, we want to display a bar chart of multiple response variables, and place the values side-by-side, like in a grouped bar chart. For both
The popular mailing list for the SAS user community hits a milestone this weekend by turning 25. 25 is often referred to as the "silver anniversary", but for a quarter century SAS users have found gold among the messages in this list, which feature everything from questions and answers about
Drill-through to detail is the ability to right click within a cell of a web report or OLAP viewer and request the detail source records that make up that specific cell's measure. The maximum number of records, by default, is set to 300,000. Feasibly the report user could download all
Winter is still 6 weeks away, but already parts of the US are under feet, that’s right FEET, of snow. All of the reports I have read say that there is no correlation between this early activity and how brutal the winter will be. I wonder if there is any
I was at the Wikipedia site the other day, looking up properties of the Chi-square distribution. I noticed that the formula for the median of the chi-square distribution with d degrees of freedom is given as ≈ d(1-2/(9d))3. However, there is no mention of how well this formula approximates the
Celebrity fame (I'm told) is overrated. Do you really want hordes of people to recognize you in the shopping mall or while you wait at a red light? Of course you don't. And that's why I advise you to never win the American Idol competition (nor should you lose with
JSM, Miami Beach, FL, July 31–August 3 Miami Beach in August is hot. Ridiculously hot. Almost as hot as our preview copies at this show. Conference goers were extremely excited about a number of our upcoming statistics titles, including Customer Segmentation and Clustering Using SAS® Enterprise Miner™, Second Edition, by
What do you call an interview on Twitter? A Tw-interview? A Twitter-view? Regardless of what you call it, I'm going to be involved in a "live chat" on Twitter this coming Thursday, 10NOV2011, 1:30–2:00pm ET. The hashtag is #saspress. Shelly Goodin (@SASPublishing) and SAS Press author recruiter Shelley Sessoms (@SSessoms)
In a production environment, where dozens of SAS programs are run in sequence, often monthly or quarterly, and where logs can span thousands of lines, it’s easy to overlook the small stuff that can cause data hangovers. Recognize any of these? A temporary data set finds its way into subsequent
Last week I showed how to use the UNIQUE-LOC technique to iterate over categories in a SAS/IML program. The observant reader might have noticed that the algorithm, although general, could be made more efficient if the data are sorted by categories. The UNIQUEBY Technique Suppose that you want to compute
