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Rick Wicklin 0
The UNIQUE-LOC trick: A real treat!

When you analyze data, you will occasionally have to deal with categorical variables. The typical situation is that you want to repeat an analysis or computation for each level (category) of a categorical variable. For example, you might want to analyze males separately from females. Unlike most other SAS procedures,

Kelly Levoyer 0
Students showcase analytics research

One great element of SAS’ Analytics2011 conference (not a SAS Users Group conference, but a great place for SAS users to find information about using SAS) is how it gives students a platform to showcase their work in analytics. Every year, hundreds of posters are submitted outlining innovative applications and research

Rick Wicklin 0
Video: Calling R from the SAS/IML Language

In SAS/IML 9.22 and beyond, you can call the R statistical programming language from within a SAS/IML program. The syntax is similar to the syntax for calling SAS from SAS/IML: You use a SUBMIT statement, but add the R option: SUBMIT / R. All statements in the program between the

Chris Hemedinger 0
Poetry on our own terms

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

Advanced Analytics
Mike Gilliland 0
Why forecasts are wrong

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

Rick Wicklin 0
The "power" of finite mixture models

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

Waynette Tubbs 0
Sy Truong reporting from WUSS 2011

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

Rick Wicklin 0
Four essential functions for statistical programmers

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

Waynette Tubbs 0
Thanks from NESUG 2011 conference co-chairs

~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

Waynette Tubbs 0
Modern portfolio theory using SAS® OR

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

Rick Wicklin 0
Does SYMPUT work in IML?

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

Anne-Lindsay Beall 0
WUSS 2011: By the numbers

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

Rick Wicklin 0
Optimizing? Two hints for specifying derivatives

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