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
Have you ever heard something referred to as the bee’s knees? Most likely the person uttering that expression meant that it was truly amazing and extraordinary. Maybe you stopped and pondered the origin of the phrase. Well wonder no more! In the 1920s in the United States, people were obsessed
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
Thousands of SAS users are migrating from SAS University Edition to SAS OnDemand for Academics (ODA). I thought I would share some of my thoughts, having just finished two books using ODA (Getting Started with SAS Programming: Using SAS Studio in the Cloud and A Gentle Introduction to Statistics Using
In the past, the COMPRESS function was useful. Since SAS version 9, it has become a blockbuster, and you might not have noticed. The major change was the addition of a new optional parameter called MODIFIERS. The traditional use of the COMPRESS function was to remove blanks or a list
In my new book, I explain how segmentation and clustering can be accomplished in three ways: coding in SAS, point-and-click in SAS Visual Statistics, and point-and-click in SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning using SAS Model Studio. These three analytical tools allow you to do many diverse types of
The more I use SAS Studio in the cloud via SAS OnDemand for Academics, the more I like it. To demonstrate how useful the Files tab is, I'm going to show you what happens when you drag a text file, a SAS data set, and a SAS program into the
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
Everyone knows that SAS has been helping programmers and coders build complex machine learning models and solve complex business problems for many years, but did you know that you can also now build machines learning models without a single line of code using SAS Viya? SAS has been helping programmers
Analytics is playing an increasingly strategic role in the ongoing digital transformation of organizations today. However, to succeed and scale your digital transformation efforts, it is critical to enable analytics skills at all tiers of your organization. In a recent blog post covering 4 principles of analytics you cannot ignore,
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
Whether you enjoy debugging or hate it, for programmers, debugging is a fact of life. It’s easy to misspell a keyword, scramble your array subscripts, or (heaven forbid!) forget a semicolon. That’s why we include a chapter on debugging in The Little SAS® Book and its companion book, Exercises and
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
Have you heard that SAS offers a collection of new, high-performance CAS procedures that are compatible with a multi-threaded approach? The free e-book Exploring SAS® Viya®: Data Mining and Machine Learning is a great resource to learn more about these procedures and the features of SAS® Visual Data Mining and
Do you wish you could predict the likelihood that one of your customers will open your marketing email? Or what if you could tell whether a new medical treatment for a patient will have a better outcome than the standard treatment? If you are familiar with propensity modeling, then you
In honor of Valentine’s day, we thought it would be fitting to present an excerpt from a paper about the LIKE operator because when you like something a lot, it may lead to love! If you want more, you can read the full paper “Like, Learn to Love SAS® Like”
One of the first and most important steps in analyzing data, whether for descriptive or inferential statistical tasks, is to check for possible errors in your data. In my book, Cody's Data Cleaning Techniques Using SAS, Third Edition, I describe a macro called %Auto_Outliers. This macro allows you to search
One great thing about being a SAS programmer is that you never run out of new things to learn. SAS often gives us a variety of methods to produce the same result. One good example of this is the DATA step and PROC SQL, both of which manipulate data. The
Are you ready to get a jump start on the new year? If you’ve been wanting to brush up your SAS skills or learn something new, there’s no time like a new decade to start! SAS Press is releasing several new books in the upcoming months to help you stay
Reading has been a part of who I am as far as I can remember. I loved listening to books as a curious child and enjoyed an audience when learning to read on my own. During grad school research, I often found myself curiously digging into one topic that led
We want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who donated their leftover (and excess) Halloween candy this year, you outdid yourselves!! We tipped the scales at just under 250 pounds of candy! So what happened to ALL that candy? Well, we are happy to report that we were able
My previous post pondered the term disestimation, coined by Charles Seife in his book Proofiness: How You’re Being Fooled by the Numbers to warn us about understating or ignoring the uncertainties surrounding a number, mistaking it for a fact instead of the error-prone estimate that it really is. Sometimes this fact appears to
In my previous post Sisyphus didn’t need a fitness tracker, I recommended that you only collect, measure and analyze big data if it helps you make a better decision or change your actions. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know ahead of time which data will meet that criteria. We often, therefore, collect, measure and analyze
Many people, myself included, occasionally complain about how noisy big data has made our world. While it is true that big data does broadcast more signal, not just more noise, we are not always able to tell the difference. Sometimes what sounds like meaningless background static is actually a big insight. Other times
Imagine if your ability to feed your family depended upon how fast you could run. Imagine the aisles of your grocery store as lanes on a running track. If you can outrun your fellow shoppers, grab food off the shelves and race through the checkout at the finish line, then
For decades, data quality experts have been telling us poor quality is bad for our data, bad for our decisions, bad for our business and just plain all around bad, bad, bad – did I already mention it’s bad? So why does poor data quality continue to exist and persist?
