SAS offering free learning resources in celebration of programmers For more than 40 years, SAS programmers have crafted software and solutions that transform the world. From statistics to data science, to analytics and artificial intelligence, people writing code have architected a new economy with incredible opportunities. SAS Programmer Week honors
I got a lot of feedback about my recent article about how to find roots of nonlinear functions by using the SOLVE function in PROC FCMP. A colleague asked how the FCMP procedure stores the functions. Specifically, why the OUTLIB= option on the PROC FCMP statement use a three-level syntax:
Finding the root (or zero) of a nonlinear function is an important computational task. In the case of a one-variable function, you can use the SOLVE function in PROC FCMP to find roots of nonlinear functions in the DATA step. This article shows how to use the SOLVE function to
SAS' Leonid Batkhan reveals how to change lengths for all character variables in a data set and all data sets in a data library to facilitate data migration to Unicode encoding environment.
A common operation in statistical data analysis is to center and scale a numerical variable. This operation is conceptually easy: you subtract the mean of the variable and divide by the variable's standard deviation. Recently, I wanted to perform a slight variation of the usual standardization: Perform a different standardization
SAS' Leonid Batkhan shows you how to split a large data set into many by a subsetting by a number of observations to produce smaller, better manageable data sets.
Is there programmatic way to reduce memory requirements of a CAS table in SAS® Viya®? Yes! SAS' Steven Sober shows you how.
A lookup table is a programming technique where one or more values can be used to retrieve another value. For example, many years ago, I had benzene exposure estimates for 10 years (1940 to 1949) for each of five locations in a factory. Given a year and a job location,
Preparing for the SAS Certified Base Programmer exam? SAS' Mark Stevens reveals the best ways to prepare.
As many of us are learning to navigate the changing world we are living in amid the COVID-19 outbreak, and as we care for our loved ones, friends, and our community, many of us now find ourselves working and studying from home much more than we did before. As an
I have written several articles about how to work with continuous probability distributions in SAS. I always emphasize that it is important to be able to compute the four essential functions for working with a statistical distribution. Namely, you need to know how to generate random values, how to compute
I'm a big fan of the Import Data task in SAS Enterprise Guide, especially for its support of text-based files (CSV, tab delimited, fixed width, and more). There's no faster method for generating SAS code that reads your data exactly the way you need it. I use the tool so
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
Let’s be honest, there is a lot of SAS content available on the web. Sometimes it gets difficult to navigate through everything to find what you need, especially if you are looking for complimentary resources. Training budgets can be limited or already used for the year, but you’re still interested
As a long-time SAS 9 programmer, I typically accomplish my data preparation tasks through some combination of the DATA Step, Proc SQL, Proc Transpose and some housekeeping procs like Proc Contents and Proc Datasets. With the introduction of SAS Viya, SAS released a new scripting language called CASL – a
SAS' Leonid Batkhan shows you how to automate creation of SAS variable labels so tables and reports are easier to read.
If you use SAS macro variables in your programs (who doesn't?), then the SAS Macro Variable viewer is immensely useful to see current macro var values.
You can represent every number as a nearby integer plus a decimal. For example, 1.3 = 1 + 0.3. The integer is called the integer part of x, whereas the decimal is called the fractional part of x (or sometimes the decimal part of x). This representation is not unique.
This blog post demonstrates process and SAS coding techniques to shift dates by a given number of workdays accounting for weekends and holidays.
2020 is here and systems that use 2-digit years in date values are getting confused. Do we mean 1920 or 2020? In SAS, the YEARCUTOFF= option lets you decide.
Last year, I wrote more than 100 posts for The DO Loop blog. The most popular articles were about SAS programming tips for data analysis, statistical analysis, and data visualization. Here are the most popular articles from 2019 in each category. SAS programming tips Create training, testing, and validation data
Parts 1 and 2 of this blog post discussed exploring and preparing your data using SASPy. To recap, Part 1 discussed how to explore data using the SASPy interface with Python. Part 2 continued with an explanation of how to prepare your data to use it with a machine-learning model.
The t-test is a very useful test that compares one variable (perhaps blood pressure) between two groups. T-tests are called t-tests because the test results are all based on t-values. T-values are an example of what statisticians call test statistics. A test statistic is a standardized value that is calculated
Learn about best-selling SAS author Ron Cody's programming standards.
Find out about the changes and enhancements to the best-selling book, The Little SAS Book.
Although I do not typically blog about undocumented SAS options, I'll make an exception this time. For many years, I have known that the CONTENTS and COMPARE procedures support the BRIEF and SHORT options, but I always forget which option goes with which procedure. For the record, here are the
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, life can surprise you in a big way, making you wonder what else you've missed. That is what happened when I recently had a chance to work with the SAS® Scalable Performance Data Server, a product that's been around a while, but
This article is not a tutorial on Hadoop, Spark, or big data. At the same time, no prerequisite knowledge of these technologies is required for understanding. We’ll give you enough background prior to diving into the details. In simplest terms, the Hadoop framework maintains the data and Spark controls and
Do you want to bin a numeric variable into a small number of discrete groups? This article compiles a dozen resources and examples related to binning a continuous variable. The examples show both equal-width binning and quantile binning. In addition to standard one-dimensional techniques, this article also discusses various techniques
Binning transforms a continuous numerical variable into a discrete variable with a small number of values. When you bin univariate data, you define cut point that define discrete groups. I've previously shown how to use PROC FORMAT in SAS to bin numerical variables and give each group a meaningful name
