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.
Tag: SAS Programming
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
Have you ever tried to pass comma-delimited values to SAS macro or to a SAS macro function? How can SAS distinguish commas separating parameters or arguments from commas separating parts of the values? Passing comma-delimited value as an argument to a SAS macro function Let’s say you want to extract
I was sitting in a model railroad club meeting when one of our more enthusiastic young members said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could make a computer simulation, with trains going between stations and all. We could have cars and engines assigned to each train and timetables and…" So,
An informat helps you read data into a SAS data set. SAS supports more than 100 informats. The most common informats are related to dates and times and make it easy to read an input string such as 28JAN2001 and convert it to a SAS date such as 15003. Yet
One of my favorite parts of summer is a relaxing weekend by the pool. Summer is the time I get to finally catch up on my reading list, which has been building over the year. So, if expanding your knowledge is a goal of yours this summer, SAS Press has
"There's a way to do it better - find it." - Thomas A. Edison When it comes to SAS coding, this quote by Thomas A. Edison is my best advisor. Time permitting, I love finding better ways of implementing SAS code. But what code feature means “better” – brevity, clarity
Want to learn SAS programming but worried about taking the plunge? Over at SAS Press, we are excited about an upcoming publication that introduces newbies to SAS in a peer-review instruction format we have found popular for the classroom. Professors Jim Blum and Jonathan Duggins have written Fundamentals of Programming
Two sayings I’ve heard countless times throughout my life are “Work smarter, not harder,” and “Use the best tool for the job.” If you need to drive a nail, you pick up a hammer, not a wrench or a screwdriver. In the programming world, this could mean using an existing
This blog post could be subtitled "To Catch a Thief" or maybe "Go ahead. Steal this blog. I dare you."* That's because I've used this technique several times to catch and report other web sites who lift the blog content from blogs.sas.com and present it as their own. Syndicating blog
Whether you are a strong believer in the power of dividing by zero, agnostic, undecided, a supporter, denier or anything in between and beyond, this blog post will bring all to a common denominator. History of injustice For how many years have you been told that you cannot divide by
A SAS programmer posted an interesting question on a SAS discussion forum. The programmer wanted to iterate over hundreds of SAS data sets, read in all the character variables, and then do some analysis. However, not every data set contains character variables, and SAS complains when you ask it to
In automated production (or business operations) environments, we often run SAS job flows in batch mode and on schedule. SAS job flow is a collection of several inter-dependent SAS programs executed as a single process. In my earlier posts, Running SAS programs in batch under Unix/Linux and Let SAS write
The SAS Learning post has merged with the SAS Users blog to provide you with all the training, certification, books, events, and programming tips you need.
SAS has worked with our exam delivery partners to integrate a live lab into an exam, which can be delivered anywhere, anytime, on-demand.
Regular expressions are a powerful method for finding specific patterns in text. The syntax of regular expressions is intimidating, but once you've solved a few pattern-recognition problems with regex, you'll never go back to your old methods.
Recently, I worked on a cybersecurity project that entailed processing a staggering number of raw text files about web traffic. Millions of rows had to be read and parsed to extract variable values. The problem was complicated by the varying records composition. Each external raw file was a collection of
SAS Press author Matt Windham shows you how to use the SAS procedure PROC HTTP to grab raw data from a website.
SAS supports direct integration for Git from Base SAS (via functions), SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Studio, and SAS Data Integration Studio. Read this article to learn how to use Git more effectively in your SAS processes.