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)
I just returned from the largest annual gathering of upstream oil and gas technology professionals. Some of the brightest minds in resource exploration – from graduate students to 50-year professionals – enjoyed the masquerade carnival that filled the exhibit hall on Halloween night. But the real entertainment was in the sessions.
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
Welcome to this new blog on data visualization at SAS. Our goal is to engage with you on a discussion about analytical and business graphics for reporting and interactive applications. Our primary focus will be on ODS Graphics and related topics, but we look forward to a lively discussion on all things
Imagine you are standing on the corner of a very busy intersection in the middle of downtown New York City. It's the peak of rush hour and you need to get across the street in a hurry. And, oh yeah, you're blindfolded. This was one of the various scenarios discussed
On September 10, 2001, I was attending a law enforcement conference in Atlantic City, NJ. While I have attended hundreds of similar meetings, this conference stands out for several reasons. First, and most obvious, it was the eve of the day where most of our lives were indelibly altered. Second,
Now this is the way you sports fans should be thinking of using SAS! Of course there are no real specifics here, but you guys are pretty smart. Here's an older story about using SAS for sports, and I'm sure you've all seen Money Ball by now. Today's series entrant is
Being able to reshape data is a useful skill in data analysis. Most of the time you can use the TRANSPOSE procedure or the SAS DATA step to reshape your data. But the SAS/IML language can be handy, too. I only use PROC TRANSPOSE a few times per year, so
Howdy. This is Andrew T. (Andy) Kuligowski, the SAS Global Forum 2012 Conference Chair. I’ve been using SAS® for more than 20 years – OK, a LOT more than 20 – and attended my first SAS Global Forum (then called SUGI, SAS Users Groups International) in Dallas, Texas back in
It’s mid-afternoon. Day 2 of the PRG2 class. Students return satiated from lunch. Some slipped into this course without taking PRG1 so they missed out on some basics. I’m trying to explain how SAS thinks. I use slides, draw pix, do everything except break into dance to get their attention.
This blog post is a "mashup" of a couple of my previous posts, combining the lessons to create something brand new that I hope you will find useful. First, let's review what we know: SAS Enterprise Guide supports a scriptable object model, which allows you to write scripts or programs
I was recently asked the following question: I am using bootstrap simulations to compute critical values for a statistical test. Suppose I have test statistic for which I want a p-value. How do I compute this? The answer to this question doesn't require knowing anything about bootstrap methods. An equivalent
As I mentioned when creating a user-defined format for Information Maps in a prior post custom or user-defined formats can be created and stored quickly in the default format catalog for all Business Intelligence products within "Lev1SASAppSASEnvironmentSASFormats". This is useful for custom sorting, reclassifying or grouping data as well as
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,
We'll interrupt the series on Why Forecasts are Wrong, with a report from the inaugural Analytics 2011 conference, held last week in Orlando. A2011 drew over 1025 attendees (from 44 states and over 25 counties). The Analytics conference series features a wide range of topics (including forecasting, optimization, data mining, text
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
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
Writing is usually very easy for me - I close the door and concentrate on the task at hand. But today, my mind is wandering. Maybe it's the changing season (it's fall in the US) that makes me think of all of the SAS users who might be reading my posts:
"I think that my data are exponentially distributed, but how can I check?" I get asked that question a lot. Well, not specifically that question. Sometimes the question is about the normal, lognormal, or gamma distribution. A related question is "Which distribution does my data have," which was recently discussed
Before a group of reporters representing countries from as far away as Mexico, Brazil and Japan, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight touted the company’s continued growth, innovation and unmatched culture during its annual Media Day event at SAS world headquarters in Cary, Tuesday. “In 2011, SAS has continued to grow as
Years ago and a seemingly far galaxy away, I wrote about how to modify 9.1.3 to start Enterprise Guide users in a different location for the File folder. By default, the user only can access their personal SAS Temporary File. Why change this? I would prefer to use a central
When you Google “big data,” you get big data about big data. We are living in the age of information overload, which creates many challenges, including big data, information silos and integration issues. It was my great pleasure to introduce a panel of experts at The Premier Business Leadership Series
The Premier Business Leadership Series in Orlando was the backdrop for a number of news announcements from SAS. Here's a rundown: 1. Big Data research A new survey has found that organizations with formal data management strategies derive more value from data assets and outperform competitors. The survey, Big Data:
I was contacted by SAS Technical Support regarding a customer who was trying to use SAS/IML to compute quantiles of the folded normal distribution. I had heard of the distribution, but it is not built into SAS and I had never worked with it. Nevertheless, I set out to understand
For the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of serving on the communications team of the National Collaborative for Bio-Preparedness (NCB-P), of which SAS is a partner and the analytics provider. That experience was heavy on my mind as I recently watched the film Contagion. I may drop some minor
