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
I jotted down the following fact from a session yesterday at the Disney Analytics & Optimization Summit: Organizations that invest in analytics perform better in the market. That's quite an assertion. Tweetable for sure. But it was a late-afternoon presentation and I was hungry for supper. So I forgot about
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
Biked to the train station this morning…felt the wind, watched trees waving in the breeze…flew past Highway 403 with trucks whizzing by…felt noble about being environmentally conscious…took the side path to the station…slowed to a halt beside the bike parking lot…opened my backpack to take out the key to lock
August was a busy month for our SAS Text Analytics team, but I was very pleased to get the invite to attend this year’s CIO 100 Conference hosted by Maryfran Johnson, Editor-in-Chief of CIO Magazine. As Master of Ceremonies, she inspired lively discussions and shared insights on IT leadership, technology
I recently attended the Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS) Conference in Austin, Texas. The MMIS conference is an annual event for federal and state HHS agencies to share programmatic and technology initiatives in Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Programs (CHIP). While I have attended numerous MMIS conferences in the past, I
Dr. Yachen Lin, Chief Risk Officer of China Guangfa Bank Credit Card Center (CGB), was interviewed while at the 2011 Premier Business Leadership Series in Singapore. He discussed the analytics culture at CGB - explaining how CGB uses analytics to know its customers and manage risk. There are only 14
I previously showed how to generate random numbers in SAS by using the RAND function in the DATA step or by using the RANDGEN subroutine in SAS/IML software. These functions generate a stream of random numbers. (In statistics, the random numbers are usually a sample from a distribution such as
At least, that's according to my colleague, Rick Wicklin. In a recent blog post, Rick points out that estimating popularity based on results of Google searches is a bad idea. Well, that just disqualified my claim that PROC REPORT is more popular than PROC TABULATE, as measured via a GoogleFight.
While talking to SAS users in Australia earlier this month, I often demonstrated the capabilities of the new Map Chart task in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3. Creating map charts has never been easier: select your map data source, then select your response data source, and click Run. Voila! You've got
Nobody wants to rub people the wrong way. We've all done it, even if word never got back to us that it happened. Having ample first-hand experience with this, I deeply appreciated the opening keynote by MIT's Michael Schrage at the 2011 Disney Analytics & Optimization Summit. Schrage, research fellow
Was the SAS Insight Series in New Zealand and Australia a prelude to the Rugby World Cup? Perhaps it was, even if you cannot find it on the list of official events. But consider these coincidences: Like the Rugby World Cup, my trip was also sponsored by MasterCard. (Okay...not
One of the highly visible changes in SAS 9.3 is the fact that the old LISTING destination is no longer the default destination for ODS output. Instead, the HTML destination is the default. One positive consequence of this is that ODS graphics and tables are interlaced in the output. Another
Bengt Persson, the Senior Vice President of Quality and Tech Support, presented a session about driving quality across the globe during the 2011 Premier Business Leadership Series in Singapore. Persson told the story of how Volvo Trucks uses analytics and data flow to standardize and optimize warranty claims across Volvo’s
There is a lot of talk hither and yon about a “double-dip” recession. Not at all uncommon when you consider past recessions. Let’s take a look at some data from the June 2011 survey of senior financial executives from the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI to dig into the double dip theories. MAPI
Exploring correlation between variables is an important part of exploratory data analysis. Before you start to model data, it is a good idea to visualize how variables related to one another. Zach Mayer, on his Modern Toolmaking blog, posted code that shows how to display and visualize correlations in R.
Contributed by Rex Pruitt, IFSUG Chairman ~ During SAS Global Forum 2011 in Las Vegas, a small group of users gathered to organize the first IFSUG (Insurance and Finance SAS Users Group). Today, there are more than 370 enrollees in IFSUG Constant Contact, 60 members in the IFSUG LinkedIn group
Notwithstanding the need to differentiate their value proposition in today’s highly competitive world, companies are sometimes forced to plagiarize even when it comes to public events. For attendees, it is generally the same ole, same ole agenda and faces, staffers drained of passion and exhibitors looking out of place while searching for a
We had a tornado in April, an earthquake on Tuesday, a drought all summer, and a hurricane arrives on Saturday. All I can figure is that Cary, NC has way too many sinners per capita. What's next -- pestilence? The BFD Makeover The BFD (and all SAS blogs) will now be
