Since joining SAS, I no longer run screaming from social media, blogs, etc. In fact, I embrace exploring different mediums to highlight how SAS is assisting today’s law enforcement. To that end, and in recognition that sometimes less is more, I give you this short intro. SAS continues to push
The SAS Output Delivery System (ODS) enables you to manage and customize tables (and graphics!) that are created by SAS procedures. I like to use the ODS SELECT statement to display only part of the output of a SAS procedure. For example, the UNIVARIATE procedure produces five tables by default,
The holiday season has just begun here in Cary, North Carolina. My favorite holiday is Christmas, but your's may be another. I'll try to outline some of the ones that are celebrated here and for some of my other global readers - I may miss an important holiday when I try
Some SAS products such as SAS/IML Studio (which is included FREE as part of SAS/IML software) have interactive graphics. This makes it easy to interrogate a graph to determine values of "hidden" variables that might not appear in the graph. For example, in a scatter plot in SAS/IML Studio, you
Calendar Heatmaps are an interesting alternative view of time-series data. The measured value is displayed as color mapped cells in a calendar. Calendar Heatmaps can be easily created with SAS 9.3 using just the HEATMAPPARM, SERIESPLOT and BLOCKPLOT statements in GTL and some simple data manipulation. The example below shows
In one minute (and 10 seconds, but are you measuring that?) you can add a custom measure (also known as calculated members) to your OLAP cube. Watch this video to create a simple calculation multiplying units * price. Remember that this mechanism is not just used for multiplications, you can
“Do you really serve M&Ms every Wednesday? Tell us the story!” clamored a wide-eyed class after sampling the M&Ms lighting up the breakout area. Seeing how hard they worked on their exercises, it seemed ok to have a slight diversion from technology. Besides as you’ll find out, the story has
Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy... - Franklin D. Roosevelt Today is the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The very next day, America declared war. During a visit to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, I discovered the results of
When viewing time series data, often we only want to see the trend in the data over time and we are not so concerned about the actual data values. With multiple time series plots, forecasting software can find clusters to help us view series with similar trends. Recently I saw a graph showing the trend of unemployment
Water and wastewater treatment plants are among the most complex facilities built and maintained by utility companies, whether public or private. Each facility contains thousands of pieces of equipment worth millions of dollars that must operate in concert for the many complex treatment processes to function effectively. The consequences of these assets
In simulation studies, the response variable is often a binary (or Bernoulli) variable. Often 1 is used to indicate "success" (or the occurrence of an event) whereas 0 indicates "failure" (or the absence of an event). For example, the following SAS/IML statements define a vector x of zeros and ones:
When I was a teenager in the 1980s I purchased my first computer: a TI-99/4A. (Wow, TI's version numbers are more confusing than ours!) I had several friends who had other brands of computers, including the TRS-80 (affectionately known as the "trash 80") and the Commodore 64. Despite our divisions
It's the holiday season again in the US. Every December, many of us break out the holly, mistletoe, fir and SAS software to ring in the Christmas spirit. What's that? Do you mean to tell me that you don't use the world's leading business analytics software to play Jingle Bells! Well,
Recently the "SAS Sample of the Day" was a Knowledge Base article with an impressively long title: Sample 42165: Using a stored process to eliminate duplicate values caused by multiple group memberships when creating a group-based, identity-driven filter in SAS® Information Map Studio "Wow," I thought. "This is the longest
The dimensions of your graph can affect the aspect ratio, which in turn, can subtly affect the perception of your viewers. When visual perception is of prime importance, the aspect ratio of the graph needs to be adjusted with care. This technique is known as ‘banking’, was introduced by William
On this blog, I've delivered a few tips about using SAS formats to stratify your data values "in place" without having to actually change your data. The most recent example addressed date and datetime variables. My previous examples included simple SAS programs that you can run in SAS display manager
Howdy. Waynette invited me to submit a blog post or two on her behalf while she rests up after a hectic Thanksgiving. Many of you don't have SAS Global Forum 2012 on your short-term radar. After all, Opening Session on April 22 is still almost 5 months away. I know
The other day someone posted the following question to the SAS-L discussion list: Is there a SAS PROC out there that takes a multi-category discrete variable with character categories and converts it to a single numeric coded variable (not a set of dummy variables) with the character categories assigned as
A frequently asked question about the Survival Plot is: "How can I display the 'At Risk' data outside the plot area?". The survival plot rendered by the LIFETEST procedure displays the at risk data inside the plot data area. The reason for this is the potential for varying number of treatment groups. Here
I got an email asking the following question: In the following program, I don't know how many variables are in the data set A. However, I do know that the variable names are X1–Xk for some value of k. How can I read them all into a SAS/IML matrix when
~Contributed by Rex Pruitt, IFSUG Chairman One of the newest SAS users groups has settled on a date, time and place for its first formal get-together. IFSUG (Insurance & Finance SAS Users Group) will meet March 4-6 in the new SAS Executive Briefing Center in Cary, NC. The IFSUG Summit will
I've heard it said that perception is everything, but can you really track and measure customer perception in a way that will allow you to effect change? The answer is yes.
I have previously written about how to create funnel plots in SAS software. A funnel plot is a way to compare the aggregated performance of many groups without ranking them. The groups can be states, counties, schools, hospitals, doctors, airlines, and so forth. A funnel plot graphs a performance metric
In a previous article we discussed how to add axis aligned statistics table to a Lipid graph using GTL. Other graphs such as the Survival Plot also utilize the same technique to display the "at risk" statistics aligned by time or visits along the X axis. Often, we also need to display
I’ve been fortunate to see a lot of the US through my work with SAS users groups. My latest trip was to Fort Worth, Texas, where I saw my first rodeo and attended the South Central SAS Users Group (SCSUG) Educational Forum.
The heatmap is a graphical representation of a table where colors are used to represent the values in the table. This is an effective graphic for finding the minimum and maximum values across the table and may surface patterns in the data. With the addition of the HEATMAPPARM statement to
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
