Every programmer makes errors. Therefore, learning to debug a program is an important part of learning to program. Another skill is learning to decipher cryptic error messages, which can be as hard to interpret as hieroglyphs. One helpful skill is learning to navigate a "traceback" error. A traceback error message
Here's a SAS tip for you. Most SAS programmers know that SAS provides syntax that makes it easy to specify a list of variables. For example, you can use the hyphen and colon operators to specify lists of variables on many SAS statements: You can use the hyphen operator (-)
In 2024, I wrote about 80 articles for The DO Loop blog. My most popular articles were about SAS programming, data visualization, and statistics. If you missed any of these articles, here is the "Reader's Choice Awards" for some of the most popular articles from 2024! SAS Programming The following
Review these three cool use cases for SAS users, built using SAS Viya Workbench. SAS and Python for better working together!
In a correlation analysis, it is common to consider the correlations between all pairs of numerical variables. That is, if there are k numerical variables, most people examine the complete k x k matrix of correlations. This matrix is symmetric and has 1s on the diagonal, so more than half of the
In SAS, range attribute maps enable you to specify the range of values that determine the colors used for graphical elements. There are various examples that use the GTL to define a range attribute map, but fewer examples that show how to use a range attribute map with PROC SGPLOT.
The INPUT function and PUT function in SAS are used to apply informats and formats (respectively) to data. For both functions, you must know in advance which informat or format you want to apply. For brevity, let's consider only applying a format. To use the PUT function, you must know
In SAS, the INPUT and PUT functions are powerful functions that enable you to convert data from character type to numeric type and vice versa. They work by applying SAS formats or informats to data. You cannot fully understand the INPUT and PUT functions without understanding formats and informats in
SAS software supports two kinds of procedures: interactive and non-interactive. Most SAS procedures are non-interactive. They begin with a PROC statement, include one or more additional statements, and end with a RUN statement. When SAS encounters the RUN statement, the procedure executes all statements, then exits. On the other hand,
In practice, there is no need to remember textbook formulas for the ANOVA test because all modern statistical software will perform the test for you. In SAS, the ANOVA procedure is designed to handle balanced designs (the same number of observations in each group) whereas the GLM procedure can handle
A previous article about how to display missing values in SAS prompted a comment about special missing values in ODS tables in SAS. Did you know that statistical tables in SAS include special missing values to represent certain situations in statistical analyses? This article explains how to interpret four special
In statistical tables in SAS, a dot (.) represents a numerical missing value. Although a dot is the default symbol in SAS, other languages use other symbols. The R language prints the symbol NA, which stands for "not available." The MATLAB language uses NaN ("Not a Number"). In Python, many
SAS has a programming language, but IS that all it is? Nope, but it still ranks high as a most marketable programming skill.
There are two programming tools that I rarely use: the SAS macro language and recursion. The SAS macro language is a tool that enables you to generate SAS statements. I rarely use the SAS macro language because the SAS IML language supports all the functionality required to write complex programs,
The SAS IML Language has a quirk with regards to functions that take no arguments. As discussed in the documentation, "modules with arguments are given a local symbol table." This is the usual behavior that programmers expect. However, the documentation goes on to state that "a module that has no
In SAS, the easiest way to draw random sampling from data is to use PROC SURVEYSELECT or the SAMPLE function in SAS IML software. I have previously written about how to implement four common sampling schemes by using PROC SURVEYSELECT and the SAMPLE function. The DATA step in SAS is
What's the difference between LENGTH and FORMAT in a SAS data set? This article shares the answer, with examples.
Just like the SAS DATA step, the SAS IML language supports both functions and subroutines. A function returns a value, so the calling syntax is familiar: y = func(x1, x2); /* the function returns one value, y */ In this syntax, the input arguments are x1 and x2. The
A previous article discusses the fact that there are often multiple ways in SAS to obtain the same result. This fact results in many vigorous discussions on online programming forums as people propose different (but equivalent) methods for solving someone's problem then argue why their preferred method is better than
A previous article discusses a formula for a confidence interval for R-square in a linear regression model (Olkin and Finn (1995) "Correlations redux", Psychological Bulletin) The formula is useful for large data sets, but should be used with caution for small samples. At the end of the previous article, I
Sometimes labels for variables get "dropped" during data preparation and cleaning. One example is when data are transposed from "wide form" to "long form." For example, suppose a data set has three variables, X, Y, and Z, each with labels. If you transpose the data to long form, the new
A SAS programmer wanted to estimate a proportion and a confidence interval (CI), but didn't know which SAS procedure to call. He knows a formula for the CI from an elementary statistics textbook. If x is the observed count of events in a random sample of size n, then the
Happy Pi Day! Every year on March 14th (written 3/14 in the US), people in the mathematical sciences celebrate all things pi-related because 3.14 is the three-decimal approximation to π ≈ 3.14159265358979.... Pi is a mathematical constant defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference (C) to its diameter (D).
I recently wrote about the Number-Word Game, which is an iterative algorithm that generates a sequence of natural numbers by using the lengths of the words for the numbers. In English, the words are "one", "two", "three", and so on. You can play the Number-Word Game in any alphabetic language
Have you heard about the Number-Word Game? This is a simple game that has the following rules: Start with any positive integer. Write down the English word for the integer. Count the number of letters in the word. This gives a new positive integer. Go to (2). Repeat until a
I sometimes see analysts overuse colors in statistical graphics. My rule of thumb is that you do not need to use color to represent a variable that is already represented in a graph. For example, it is redundant to use a continuous color ramp to represent the lengths of bars
This phenomenon has been in the news recently, so I've updated this article that I originally published in 2017. The paper currency in circulation in the US is mostly $100 bills. And not just by a little bit -- these account for 34% of the notes by denomination and nearly
How to calculate a leap year in SAS - the easy way!
The SAS extension for VS Code supports SAS syntax and programming, and can connect to almost all SAS environments.
A SAS programmer wanted to find the name of the variable for each row that contains the largest value. This task is useful for wide data sets in which each observation has several variables that are measured on the same scale. For example, each observation in the data might represent
