Belated code
SAS Code for your Valentine - just in case you forgot to get flowers, chocolate or other tokens of affection for the big day yesterday.
Tag: Friday’s Innovation Inspiration
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Visualization lets them 'see' the data
Were you at SAS Global Forum last spring? Dr. Goodnight sat down at a computer console and personally demonstrated the cool things that SAS® Visual Analytics Explorer can do? Take a look at his demo, and then imagine working in a drag-and-drop, point and click environment with billions of rows
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Recycle, reuse
This technical case study by Faisal Dosani, Royal Bank of Canada; Lisa Eckler, Lisa Eckler Consulting Inc.; and Marje Fecht, Prowerk Consulting Ltd., discusses the steps to develop a hands-off process for creating flexible and extensible solutions that avoid maintainability issues and enable speed to market of results. Building reusable
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Efficient credit scoring
The traditional methods of making credit decisions relied mostly on human judgment; those have been replaced by methods that use statistical models. Today, statistical models are used not only for deciding whether to accept an applicant (application scoring), but also to predict the likelihood of defaults among customers who have
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Social network analysis and automation
Big data seemed like all of the other marketing hype that we hear. But as the months have gone by, it seems clear that everyone is dealing with big data. You know, data coming in so fast that you can't adequately analyze it (at least not as efficiently and quickly
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Version control
Anything that you do manually leaves the door open for error; this is especially true for your file system. Aside from that, automated processes are usually faster. Magnus Mengelbier has applied this philosophy to providing version control capabilities to SAS data sets, programs and outputs.
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Hiring for keeps
I recently published a post based on an InformationWeek article about the need for more analytic talent and tips for finding the right talent. InformationWeek failed to include information about using SAS to uncover fraudulent responses in applications. This Post-It Note author uses SAS for that and entertainment.
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - A %mockery?
Yao Huang says that you can use the %mock_table SAS macro to build mock tables needed for Phase I clinical trials. "Instead of spending a lot time to create or modify each table using a word processor, statisticians or programmers can quickly run this macro using a pre-specified excel template
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Consolidated reporting for big data
With an exponential growth in transactions, it may be hard to get a clear, single view of customer interactions. ICICI Bank , India's second largest bank, needed a single system that could replace multiple (complex to maintain) reporting systems - enterprise wide. The challenge - finding a solution to handle its growing
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - SAS templates for efficiency
Collaboration can be difficult, but what if you could provide a template that helps everyone work together more efficiently? The Post-It note author below has developed such a tool and suggests using it as a guide for accepted coding standards. You can also use templates to control the look of
Friday's Innovation Inspiration: Reducing CPU time with PROC Format
Jenine Milum is the Vice President and Analytics Manager at Wells Fargo Bank. About 10 years ago, she learned a valuable, but little known solution to cutting the CPU processing time when dealing with large data sets. "We were processing log activity for our website on a daily basis," says Milum,
Friday's Innovation Inspiration: Calculating frequencies in PROC MEANS
In pharmaceutical research, analysts often want to see the number of respondents who are at each site and the treatment they receive. Apparently, there's more than one way to produce correct results when you are using the PROC MEANS procedure. In Janet Willis' paper, Do You Have Too Much Class?, (awarded Best
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Parsing for 100% comparison
Did I tell you that I went to Andrew Kuligowski's hands-on workshop while I was at MWSUG 2012? Actually, I only attended the first portion of his session; it didn't make sense for me to take up a computer since I'm not a programmer. His workshop was to teach users how to parse useful data from unusual
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Macros at Coder's Corner, MWSUG 2012
As part of the Friday's Innovation Inspiration (FII) series, I've decided to present a few SAS techniques and problem solvers that you labeled as innovative or 'inspirational'. These are pretty easy to find: I've done some digging through the Best Contributed Papers. I know you haven't read them all, so
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Fish mating calls?
I'm going to handle this Friday's Innovation Inspiration a bit differently from the way I usually do; rather than helping you find information so that you can try this on your own, I'd like to know what you would use to display fish mating calls. Obviously you would need a few
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - BUBBLE option?
I have to say that I've never heard of the Bubble option, so I looked it up on support.sas.com (my go-to place for searches on customer problems or to simply to learn something about SAS). The search led me to documentation for the statement options in SAS ODS Graphics. So, I assume the
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - The big C PROCs: CONTENTS AND COMPARE
I chose this Post-It note this week because it reminded me of a MWSUG paper presentation that I listened to and wrote about. Patricia Hettinger presented "New vs. Old - Under the Hood with PROCs CONTENTS and COMPARE" in the Data Management and Data Mining section. I didn't do it justice in my
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - That's a COPY
Diane Olson, from SAS, wrote a SAS Global Forum paper in 2011 that seems ready-made for this SAS user's Post-It note. Olson wrote about PROC COPY and PROC APPEND. In her paper, she lets you in on the inside tricks on how to clone your data set to the same library, copy
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Digging in to social data
A super hot topic in most organizations is how to make the most of the troves of social data available. This Post-It Note author isn't specific about the SAS solution that is being used, so I'm going to speculate that he or she is taking advantage of SAS Text Miner, SAS Text
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Automated reports and poster ideas!
This Post-It Note reminds me of a presentation at SAS Global Forum 2012 about automating reports. Of course, these Post-It Notes always remind me of presentations. This week, instead of pointing you to a bunch of past presentations, I'm going to challenge you to use this note as an idea
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Ratemaking
In this Innovation Inspiration, a SAS user has developed the insurance rating plans for a country using predictive modeling. How exciting! Additionally, the system adjusts based upon actual experience. This is quite the accomplishment given the complexity of the ratemaking for even a small geographical territory. The comments section reveal the identity of this innovator. Check it out.
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Extracting data from Oracle
It's so important for companies to build what customers want rather than build a product and then convince the market to buy it. So I love it when I hear or read remarks like the one below - SAS has grown with me. That means that we have listened to
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - A billion rows on the fly
The first time that I saw a demonstration of SAS Visual Analytics Explorer was awesome, but it didn't give me goosebumps. I got goosebumps the size of golfballs during SAS Global Forum Opening Session when Dr. Goodnight sat down at a computer screen and began to demonstrate how effortlessly users can
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - High-performance analytics with Jim Goodnight
One of the coolest things that I saw at SAS Global Forum was Dr. Goodnight dissecting a hologram of a SAS high-performance server and describing how the technology works with analytics. This is the height of innovation. You have got to watch this! Here are a few great
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Put up or shut up
Put up or shut up is one of those great sayings from my generation. Loosely translated it means, stop complaining if you aren't going to do something about the problem. In this week's Innovation Inspiration, the author decided to teach American middle schoolers how to question the information that they
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Jenine Milum creates a report
At SAS Global Forum, one of the most difficult areas for me to show to you are the poster presentations. This year, I asked Steve Polilli, a colleague who is great with a Flipcam, to video a few for me. I picked out three that I will use in the
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - High schoolers analyzing high schoolers
Part of what captivated me about this paper and poster presentation were the presenters - these guys are high school kids using SAS to do a visual analysis of Internet use by high schoolers. The idea was so compelling that Anna Brown and Inside SAS Global Forum went to talk
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - A trend, fraud sniffer
Jenn Sykes (you probably remember her from this great sentiment analysis post last year about American Idol), presented Predicting Electoral Outcomes with SAS® Sentiment Analysis and SAS® Forecast Studio at SAS Global Forum 2012. In addition to predicting elections, Sykes tells Anna Brown from Inside SAS Global Forum, that there is a lot of unstructured data
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - One step ahead of fraudsters
As always, SAS Global Forum holds a wealth of inspiration. The conversations that I have with you guys while I'm there almost always start with, "I just heard/saw/read the coolest thing. I can't wait to get home and get started using this!" For those of you who missed this year's
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - A chapter from the book
Today, I have truly taken a chapter from the book - perhaps in more ways than one. I happened to notice that Art Carpenter's most recent book is titled, "Carpenter's Guide to Innovative SAS Techniques." Of course, you know that linking innovation and SAS are going to be a trigger