I've been very fortunate to meet a lot of SAS users during my scant 3 year tour at SAS. I've met them while attending SAS Global Forum 2009, 2010, and 2011; NESUG 2009, 2010 and 2011; and SESUG 2010. Of course, like you, I want to go to all of the
In SAS/IML 9.22 and beyond, you can call any SAS procedure, DATA step, or macro from within a SAS/IML program. The syntax is simple: place a SUBMIT statement prior to the SAS statements and place an ENDSUBMIT statement after the SAS statements. This enables you to call any SAS procedure
Within the SAS documentation there must be thousands of unique words. But ten words occur more than any others within the SAS documentation corpus: SAS, data, statement, option, set, value, variable, PROC, model, table. This is according to one of our staff terminologists, Vicki Leary, who helps to keep our use of these words consistent and
This week brought big news of one of the most cruel and heartless tyrants of the 21st century. This man is known for narcissistic behavior, surrounding himself with a cadre of beautiful women, sleeping in a different place every night, picking new favorites each week, and bringing tears and untold suffering
In my Friday series about innovation, I've decided to include some personal stories of unusual and unique uses of SAS. Once a month or so, I'll swap out the Post-it Notes for a profile of someone who has used SAS in an innovative way to solve a problem or, like
When I learn a new statistical technique, one of first things I do is to understand the limitations of the technique. This blog post shares some thoughts on modeling finite mixture models with the FMM procedure. What is a reasonable task for FMM? When are you asking too much? I
Halloween is around the corner and children everywhere will wear masks throughout their neighborhoods for a night of trick-or-treating fun and, likely, too much candy. A masking has also occurred in education policy with the No Child Left Behind Act, sans the candy at the end of the night. That
Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of reading Tom Wallace's new book, Sales & Operations Planning: Beyond the Basics. This is not an introductory "how to" book -- Tom and Bob Stahl have already written those -- but instead covers nine major companies that have implemented (and extended!) S&OP
If you've been to a SAS Forum, US SAS Regional or local SAS event, you know that it is impossible to see and hear everything that is on your list. Imagine how disappointed your SAS colleagues are who are sitting at home. They would love to hear about what you
Normal, Poisson, exponential—these and other "named" distributions are used daily by statisticians for modeling and analysis. There are four operations that are used often when you work with statistical distributions. In SAS software, the operations are available by using the following four functions, which are essential for every statistical programmer
Functionality to upload files onto the SAS server (from 9.2 on) is available using stored processes and an html input type="file". I introduced this topic last year in my blog post using the SAS Stored Process Developer Guide sample. Of course, it is never as easy as the sample is
~Contributed by Paul Gorrell and Warren Stinson, Conference Co-Chairs There were 384 attendees from 23 states and 6 countries gathered at the Holiday Inn By The Bay in Portland, Maine for three days to present, discuss, code, blog and tweet, using both familiar and new ways to share SAS expertise. There
With data standards rising in every industry, there’s a high demand for analysts and an unfortunate shortage of analytic talent. Many organizations are turning to student internships as a low-cost way to hire support, train potential new employees and provide real-world experience for students.
The premise of the modern portfolio theory (MPT), proposed by Harry Markowitz in 1952, is diversity. Murphy Choy says that means you should “never put all of your eggs in the same basket.” According to Choy, the theory was never meant to be used with complex investment products because they
I received the following email: Dear Dr. Wicklin, Why doesn't SYMPUT work in IML? In the DATA step, I can say CALL SYMPUT("MyMacro", 5) but this doesn't work in IML! Frustrated Dear Frustrated, The SYMPUT subroutine does work in SAS/IML software! However, the second argument to SYMPUT must be a
Ready for some fun facts? These tidbits were all shared during the Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS) conference held in San Francisco this week: 1. How many million dollars did a simple Excel spreadsheet error cost TransAlta? Answer: $24 million 2. What percentage of mobile phone users older
There are days that I could use code like this to make two of myself. No, that would never work; then I would be bored with so much time on my hands! In this new series, called Friday's Innovation Inspiration, we'll take a look at Post-It Notes from the 2011 Innovation Walls. SAS users filled
I previously wrote about using SAS/IML for nonlinear optimization, and demonstrated optimization by maximizing a likelihood function. Many well-known optimization algorithms require derivative information during the optimization, including the conjugate gradient method (implemented in the NLPCG subroutine) and the Newton-Raphson method (implemented in the NLPNRA method). You should specify analytic
At the Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS)conference this morning, I witnessed my first Super Demo, taught by SAS’ own Andy Ravenna covering the major improvements to the latest version of SAS® Enterprise Guide®. The coolest new new features: Mouse over tooltip – gives you help right in the program editor
~Contributed by Melissa Perez, SAS Customer Loyalty~ Making sure our customers have a great experience with SAS is the goal of the US Customer Loyalty team. SAS has a wealth of resources available to our customers and the loyalty team is a dedicated resource to provide support and act as
The Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS) have the best acronym ever, and they're putting on an amazing conference in San Francisco this week. The conference kicked off today with conference chairs Kathryn Valdes and Ginger Carey’s announcement that the Pacific Northwest Users Group is merging with WUSS next year, adding
Picture this – a student grabs the Programming 1 textbook, scans it quickly seemingly searching for something specific, and shakes his head indicating an unsuccessful search. He plants himself smack dab in the front row, looks me squarely in the eye, raises one eyebrow quizzically and says, “Bad words?” I
The road to becoming a SAS Rock Star often starts at SAS Global Forum. Start making your mark by sharing how you use SAS at the 2012 SAS Global Forum, to be held in sunny Orlando, FL, from April 22 to 25. Submissions are being considered in the technology
A popular use of SAS/IML software is to optimize functions of several variables. One statistical application of optimization is estimating parameters that optimize the maximum likelihood function. This post gives a simple example for maximum likelihood estimation (MLE): fitting a parametric density estimate to data. Which density curve fits the
SAS experts are gearing up to share knowledge, expertise and insights at SAS Global Forum 2012 In the last two months alone, we have launched SAS 9.3, created a think tank on healthcare analytics, hired a Chief Medical Officer, released a new version of Curriculum Pathways and offered flashcards for
What is the best way to organize your SAS work in a SAS Enterprise Guide project? There are no project templates or enforced structure, really, but isn't there a best practice? I don't have a single prescription for the best project organization. I believe that it depends on the nature
To celebrate the first anniversary of Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software, you can now download the SAS/IML tip sheets (also called "cheat sheets") that I created for the book. At conferences, SAS Press displays these tip sheets next to my book. They have been very popular. Download these SAS/IML cheat
Chris Hemedinger, author of the SAS Dummy blog, read last week's Innovation Inspiration post and was reminded of a couple of cool things he'd seen SAS users do. He also told me of one of his most recent rock star moments. (In all fairness to Hemedinger, he didn't call his
I've noticed that a lot of people want to be able to draw bar charts with confidence intervals. This topic is a frequent posting on the SAS/GRAPH and ODS Graphics Discussion Forum and on the SAS-L mailing list. Consequently, this post describes how to add errors bars to a bar
With an increasing volume of curriculum to cover and no time to spare, teachers often hit the ground running with the full throttle rigor and relevance critical to teaching and learning. However, I argue that the first two R’s are futile if teachers don’t have meaningful relationships with their students.
