DATA Step or PROC? It depends...
Which SAS technique should you use? Consider how often the program is to be run, your comfort level and more.
Tag: sas books
Using SAS to score a test
If you have ever needed to score a multiple-choice test, this blog is for you. Even if you are not planning to score a test, the techniques used in this example are useful for many other programming tasks. The example I am going to present assumes the answer key and
Unexpected results from missing values with PROC SQL
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.
Meet our SAS Press Author of the Month -- Jane Eslinger
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
Meet our SAS Press Author of the Month – Ron Cody
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
Why learn SQL?
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
The AggregateTable operator… It’s the bee’s knees!
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
Fun with Ciphers (Part 1)
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
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks… or can you?
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
Two macros for detecting data errors
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
Summarizing data
Because it is near the end of the year, I thought a blog about "Summarizing" data might be in order. For these examples, I am going to use a simulated data set called Drug_Study, containing some categorical and numerical variables. For those interested readers, the SAS code that I used
Using variable names with special characters
When we wrote the sixth edition of The Little SAS Book: A Primer, one of our goals was to write it for all SAS programmers regardless of which interface they use for coding: SAS Studio, SAS Enterprise Guide, the SAS windowing environment, or batch. This is harder than it sounds.
Top Books for SAS Programmers
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
Migrating from SAS University Edition to SAS OnDemand for Academics
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
The Amazing COMPRESS Function
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
Clustering made simple
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
Reordering rows and columns in a 2x2 table with SAS® Studio Tasks
In SAS Studio, the ordering of rows and columns in the Table Analysis task are, by default, arranged by the internal ordering of the values used in the table. The table arranges the variables alphabetically or numerically by increasing value. For example, traditional coding uses 1 for Yes and 0
Viewing files, programs, and data sets in SAS Studio
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
Creating codebooks with SAS macros
SAS Press author Kim Chantala shows you how to to spend less time preparing data so you can lavish time on analysis.
How to create a Napoleon plot with Graph Template Language (GTL)
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 value of a low-code/no-code approach to building machine learning models
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
Learning to think like SAS
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
SAS and Open-Source Model Management (free eBook)
Turn analytical models into business value and smarter decisions with this special collection of papers about SAS Model Management. Without a structured and standardized process to integrate and coordinate all the different pieces of the model life cycle, a business can experience increased costs and missed opportunities. SAS Model Management solutions enable organizations to register, test, deploy, monitor, and retrain analytical models, leveraging any available technology – including open-source models in Python, R, and TensorFlow –into a competitive advantage.
Adjusting outliers with the 1.5 IQR rule
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
What's wrong with this code?
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
Free e-book: SAS Programming for R Users
At SAS Press, we agree with the saying “The best things in life are free.” And one of the best things in life is knowledge. That’s why we offer free e-books to help you learn SAS or improve your skills. In this blog post, we will introduce you to one
Learn about new data mining and machine learning procedures in SAS Viya
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
Propensity Score Estimation with PROC PSMATCH and PROC LOGISTIC
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
Test your SAS skills with the newest edition of Exercises and Projects for The Little SAS Book
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.
Learn to Love SAS LIKE
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”