Last week I showed a graph of the number of US births for each day in 2002, which shows a strong day-of-the-week effect. The graph also shows that the number of births on a given day is affected by US holidays. This blog post looks closer at the holiday effect.
As schools across the country delve into a new year, I want to bring my readers back to teaching basics with Part 2 of my Three R’s series on Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships. Here's Part 1. As students flood our halls and classrooms, are they eager and excited for the challenging year ahead? Do
Metadata is data about data. For the purposes of his NESUG 2011 presentation, Frank DiIorio defined metadata more precisely as data about data and data that describes workflow objects and processes. DiIorio wrote his paper because organizations are challenged more and more today to do more with less. Metadata can
As I mentioned in my introductory post about Windows PowerShell, you can use PowerShell commands as a simple and concise method to collect data from your Windows systems -- information that is ripe for analysis within SAS. In this example, I'll show a technique for using a SAS program to
Look at the following graphs showing one weekly time series. The left hand shows the actual time series plot. To the less statistically inclined this plot might indicate that the data is seasonal due to the troughs during summer and the peaks during winter. However, if you were to use
Polynomials are used often in data analysis. Low-order polynomials are used in regression to model the relationship between variables. Polynomials are used in numerical analysis for numerical integration and Taylor series approximations. It is therefore important to be able to evaluate polynomials in an efficient manner. My favorite evaluation technique
In this guest blog, my colleague Snurre Jensen (Analytic Solutions Manager, SAS EMEA Technology Practice) discusses a fine point regarding the word “seasonality” in time series forecasting. When we see general ups and downs in the data that tend to repeat year after year, we commonly refer to this as
Rick Wicklin and I are engaged in an arms race of birthday-related blog posts. To recap: Rick analyzed national data about births in the USA and what time of year they are most likely to occur. I responded by analyzing the birthdays of my Facebook friends. Rick responded by analyzing
Contributed by Sara Jones, CMP, User and Customer Marketing at SAS So many papers, so little time. Looking at the SAS users group conference schedule and deciding what to attend and how to get the very most of your day can be overwhelming - in a good way of course. So many
My friend Chris posted an analysis of the distribution of birthdays for 236 of his Facebook friends. He noted that more of his friends have birthdays in April than in September. The numbers were 28 for April, but only 25 for September. As I reported in my post on "the
Telecommuting is not always a matter of working from home. Virtual team workers are often located in a satellite office, in another country or are temporarily out of the office. Today, many managers have no choice but to incorporate telecommuting members into their team structure. Mary Varughese, Mei Dey and
Kathleen Harkins, Carolyn Maass and Mary Anne Rutkowski, from Merck Sharp and Dohme, collaborated to write T.I.P.S: Techniques and information for programming in SAS® for NESUG 2011. These three women are highly experienced programmers: Harkins has more than 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical and aerospace industries; Maass has
The downturn in the economy beginning in 2008 and continuing even to now has put tremendous pressure on local governments to do “less with less”. In the past when economic downturns caused service level cut backs the cry was to do “more with less”. The idea was to identify ways
Windows PowerShell is one of my favorite tools to use for gathering information from my PC and network, and also for automating processes. If you are familiar with UNIX shells (such as Korn shell or its variants), you will probably be very comfortable with Windows PowerShell. Just like its UNIX
You can extend the capability of the SAS/IML language by writing modules. A module is a user-defined function. You can define a module by using the START and FINISH statements. Many people, including myself, define modules at the top of the SAS/IML program in which they are used. You can
My first trip to Portland, Maine, gave me more than I had expected - it was a touching, heartwarming experience that was not what I thought I'd signed up for. Let me explain: While planning my flight and other travel arrangements, I realized that I would arrive in Portland early
Earlier today, Rick posted interesting information about which time of year the most babies are born, at least in the USA. I don't have data nearly as extensive as what's available at the NCHS, but I do have a sample of birthday records to compare against Rick's findings. My sample
Do you know someone who has a birthday in mid-September? Odds are that you do: the middle of September is when most US babies are born, according to data obtained from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Web site (see Table 1-16). There's an easy way to remember this
Did you know that the Pacific Northwest SAS® Users Group (PNWSUG) is the oldest regional SAS users group in the U S, offering conferences since 1981? This year PNWSUG updated their usual multi-day, one location conference. They'll offer two convenient one-day conferences: one on September 19 in Seattle and one September
I use Google Reader to keep up with SAS-related conversations on the blogosphere. I thought it would be nice to share the lists of blogs that I follow as "shared bundles". If you also use Google Reader, it will be very easy for you to add these bundles to
‘Context’ defined (as cited from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary): 1: the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning; and, 2: the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs: environment, setting. While context is clearly important, today it is consistently
Looping is essential to statistical programming. Whether you need to iterate over parameters in an algorithm or indices in an array, a loop is often one of the first programming constructs that a beginning programmer learns. Today is the first anniversary of this blog, which is named The DO Loop,
In Part 1, Udo provided SAS code to replicate the example in Hyndman's blog. Below, he shows the results of out-of-sample testing, and draws some conclusions on the computational efficiency of this approach. Out-of-sample Testing In addition to the example shared by Hyndman, out-of-sample data was used to illustrate the final performance
We ship many sample data sets with SAS products. By using well-understood sample data sets, we can teach concepts or show off product features without distracting the audience/students with data collection or prep. At least, that's the way it's supposed to work. But occasionally the sample data can cause a
In this guest blogger post, Udo Sglavo of the Advanced Analytics Division of SAS shows how to conduct time series cross-validation using SAS Forecast Server. Udo replicates the example from Rob J Hyndman's Research Tips blog. Replicating the Example In order to replicate the example in Hyndman's blog, the example
My elderly mother enjoys playing Scrabble®. The only problem is that my father and most of my siblings won't play with her because she beats them all the time! Consequently, my mother is always excited when I visit because I'll play a few Scrabble games with her. During a recent
Academic Chair Barbara Okerson and Operations Team Lead Marje Fecht are chairing the 2011 SouthEast SAS Users Group (SESUG) conference. This year's conference will be held in another wonderful historical city slightly north of the 2010 Savannah location; it'll be located in Alexandria, Virginia, October 23 - 25. The format
It's been a well-known limitation for a long time. When you connect to a SAS session using SAS Enterprise Guide, shell commands (including X command, SYSTASK, and FILENAME PIPE) are off-limits because the default SAS invocation disables them. It does this by including -NOXCMD as a command-line option. This makes
Hurricane Irene impacted 20% of the US population and will cost billions in recovery dollars. Now that the water has begun to subside, the real long term work begins. And it is this work that can be another disaster, or, a real economic benefit to a state. How so? FEMA
The hurricane didn't get me, but Monday night's thunderstorm sure played a dirty trick. After leaving my car windows cracked open over night, I drove to work Tuesday morning feeling a little soggier by the minute. Upon arrival at SAS, I was aghast to find the seat of my pants was soaked
