My new SAS Press book “An Introduction to SAS Visual Analytics” (written in collaboration with Tricia Aanderud and Rob Collum) covers all of the different aspects of SAS® Visual Analytics, including how to develop reports, load data, and handle administration. Below is an example of the types of tips that you can find
In this post I describe the important tasks of data preparation, exploration and binning.These three steps enable you to know your data well and build accurate predictive models. First you need to clean your data. Cleaning includes eliminating variables which have uneven spread across the target variable. I give an
Nowadays, whether you write SAS programs or use point-and-click methods to get results, you have choices for how you access SAS. Currently, when you open Base SAS most people get the traditional SAS windowing environment (aka Display Manager) as their interface. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If
Datasets are rarely ready for analysis, and one of the most prevalent problems is missing data. This post is the first in a short series focusing on how to think about missingness, how JMP13 can help us determine the scope of missing data in a given table, and how to
In a previous blog, I demonstrated a program and macro that could identify all numeric variables set to a specific value, such as 999. This blog discusses an immensely useful technique that allows you to perform an operation on all numeric or all character variables in a SAS data set.
When I teach my Data Cleaning course, the last topic I cover in the two-day course is SAS Integrity Constraints. I find that most of the students, who are usually quite advanced programmers, have never heard of Integrity Constraints (abbreviated ICs). I decided a short discussion on this topic would
Wait! Don't close this window. I understand that regular expressions can be very complicated (yes, there are many books on the subject), but some basic expressions to test patterns such as zip codes or telephone numbers are not that difficult. In addition, you can sometimes use Google to search for
How many times have you entered a phone number on a web page, only to be told that you did not type it the "correct" form? I find that annoying. Don't you? In my latest book, Cody's Data Cleaning Techniques, 3rd edition, I show how to convert a phone number
The little SAS program’s official name was Extract_Transform_Load_ 0314.sas. But, that name was much too formal, way too long, and did not roll off of the tongue very easily at all. So, everybody simply called her: ETL Pi. ETL Pi was conceived in a 2-hour project strategy meeting in conference
When developing SAS® data sets, program code and/or applications, efficiency is not always given the attention it deserves, particularly in the early phases of development. Since data sizes and system performance can affect a program and/or an application’s behavior, SAS users may want to access information about a data set’s
