SAS SQL handles missing values differently than the ANSI standard for SQL. PROC SQL follows the SAS convention for handling missing values: numerical missing values are always interpreted as less or smaller than all nonmissing values. My first blog showed that missing values can be troublemakers in non-grouped descriptive statistics.
We publish a lot of books by SAS experts at SAS Press, but how does someone become an expert in the first place? Becoming certified is one step, but who develops the certifications in the first place? Those are the true experts. They have to have a deep understanding of
Recently, the SAS Press team moved to a new building on the SAS campus. And when the SAS Press team moves, we bring a lot of books with us! Packing and organizing all of our books gave us a chance to appreciate all of our authors’ hard work during the
SQL (Structured Query Language) is the most widely used programming language for relational databases worldwide. No other programming language produces more hits for a web search than SQL and interest is growing rapidly. In June 2010, Google showed 135 million hits versus 586 million hits in June 2020. SQL is
This blog serves two purposes: the main purpose is to show you some useful SAS coding techniques, and the second is to show you an interesting method of creating a Beale cipher. TJ Beale is famous in Virginia for leaving behind three ciphers, supposedly describing the location of hidden gold
When we moved out to the country with our two dogs, our oldest dog Todd suddenly decided he liked to howl…. And he would do so every time we left the house. Maybe it was the country air? Maybe it was a time-lapse gene? Maybe he just wanted to learn
Last year, I wrote a blog demonstrating how to use the %Auto_Outliers macro to automatically identify possible data errors. This blog demonstrates a different approach—one that is useful for variables for which you can identify reasonable ranges of values for each variable. For example, you would not expect resting heart
The Day of the Programmer is not enough time to celebrate our favorite code-creators. That’s why at SAS, we celebrate an entire week with SAS Programmer Week! If you want to extend the fun and learning of SAS Programmer Week year-round, SAS Press is here to support you with books
Do you need to see how long patients have been treated for? Would you like to know if a patient’s dose has changed, or if the patient experienced any dose interruptions? If so, you can use a Napoleon plot, also known as a swimmer plot, in conjunction with your exposure
The following is an excerpt from Cautionary Tales in Designed Experiments by David Salsburg. This book is available to download for free from SAS Press. The book aims to explain statistical design of experiments (DOE) to readers with minimal mathematical knowledge and skills. In this excerpt, you will learn about
Decision trees are a fundamental machine learning technique that every data scientist should know. Luckily, the construction and implementation of decision trees in SAS is straightforward and easy to produce. There are simply three sections to review for the development of decision trees: Data Tree development Model evaluation Data The
The most fundamental concept that students learning introductory SAS programming must master is how SAS handles data. This might seem like an obvious statement, but it is often overlooked by students in their rush to produce code that works. I often tell my class to step back for a moment
In my new book, End-to-End Data Science with SAS: A Hands-On Programming Guide, I use the 1.5 IQR rule to adjust multiple variables. This program utilizes a macro that loops through a list of variables to make the necessary adjustments and creates an output data set. One of the most
While working at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, I had access to data on over ten million visits to emergency departments in central New Jersey, including ICD-9 (International Classification of Disease – 9th edition) codes along with some patient demographic data. I also had the ozone level from
If you have been using SAS for long, you have probably noticed that there is generally more than one way to do anything. (For an example, see my co-author Lora Delwiche’s blog about PROC SQL.) The Little SAS Book has long covered reading and writing Microsoft Excel files with the
In case you missed the news, there is a new edition of The Little SAS Book! Last fall, we completed the sixth edition of our book, and even though it is actually a few pages shorter than the fifth edition, we managed to add many more topics to the book.
You’re probably already familiar with Leonid Batkhan from his popular blog right here on The Learning Post. In fact, he’s one of our most engaging authors, with thousands of views and hundreds of comments. Leonid is a true SAS Sensei. He has been at SAS for nearly 25 years and
Did you ever wish you could master SAS/GRAPH, and create graphs and maps that were customized exactly like you wanted them? Then this free eBook is for you! Probably the most memorable book for me was the Necronomicon in the Army of Darkness movie. How many of you liked that
