"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
What is Item Response Theory? Item Response Theory (IRT) is a way to analyze responses to tests or questionnaires with the goal of improving measurement accuracy and reliability. A common application is in testing a student’s ability or knowledge. Today, all major psychological and educational tests are built using IRT.
This article is a follow-on to a recent post from Jeff Owens, Getting started with SAS Containers. In that post, Jeff discussed building and running a single container for a SAS Viya runtime/IDE. Today we will go through how to build and run the full SAS Viya stack - visual
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
Interested in making business decisions with big data analytics? Our Wiley SAS Business Series book Profit Driven Business Analytics: A Practitioner’s Guide to Transforming Big Data into Added Value by Bart Baesens, Wouter Verbeke, and Cristian Danilo Bravo Roman has just the information you need to learn how to use
May 12th is #NationalLimerickDay! If you saw our Valentine’s Day poem, you know we at SAS Press love creating poems and fun rhymes, so check out our limericks below! So, what’s a limerick? National Limerick Day is observed each year on May 12th and honors the birthday of the famed
App security is at the top of mind for just about everybody – users, IT folks, business executives. Rightfully so. Mobile apps and the devices on which they reside tend to travel around, without any physical boundaries that encompass the traditional desktop computers. In chatting with folks who are evaluating
As a SAS programmer, you are asked to do many things with your data -- reading, writing, calculating, building interfaces, and occasionally sending data outside of SAS. One of the most popular outputs you may be tasked with creating is likely a Microsoft Excel workbook. Have you ever heard, “just
Imagine a world where satisfying human-computer dialogues exist. With the resurgence of interest in natural language processing (NLP) and understanding (NLU) – that day may not be far off. In order to provide more satisfying interactions with machines, researchers are designing smart systems that use artificial intelligence (AI) to develop
As word spreads that SAS integrates with open source technologies, people are beginning to explore how to connect, interact with, and use SAS in new ways. More and more users are examining the possibilities and with this comes questions like: How do I code A, integrate B, and accomplish C?
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
As of December 2018, any customer with a valid SAS Viya order is able to package and deploy their SAS Viya software in Docker containers. SAS has provided a fully documented and supported project (or “recipe”) for easily building these containers. So how can you start? You can simply stop
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
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
My New Year's resolution: “Unclutter your life” and I hope this post will help you do the same. Here I share with you a data preparation approach and SAS coding technique that will significantly simplify, unclutter and streamline your SAS programming life by using data templates. Dictionary.com defines template as
In their new book, SAS Viya: the R Perspective, Kevin Smith and Xiangxiang Meng provide an overview of using R with the SAS Viya platform. Read on to see how R programmers can use CAS.
Deep learning (DL) is a subset of neural networks, which have been around since the 1960’s. Computing resources and the need for a lot of data during training were the crippling factor for neural networks. But with the growing availability of computing resources such as multi-core machines, graphics processing units
SAS batch jobs can generate many log files that accumulate over time. In this post, we present a SAS program that cleans up old log files on your system.
While SAS program development is usually done in an interactive SAS environment (SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Display Manager, SAS Studio, etc.), when it comes to running SAS programs in a production or operations environment, it is routinely done in batch mode. Why run SAS programs in batch mode? First and
There is certainly no shortage of terrific tips and tricks in various SAS blogs from some of our most distinguished SAS in-house experts. But, there's another group of equally qualified experts who don't often get to share their expertise on this channel: our customers. So, I went on a quest to get
The purpose of this blog post is to demonstrate a SAS coding technique that allows for calculations with multiple variables and multiple observations across a SAS dataset. This technique can be useful for working with time series, clinical trials, - in any data step calculations involving values from different observations.
Whether you are a SAS code creator, a blogger, a technical writer, an editor-in-chief, an executive, a secretary, a developer or programmer in any programming language or simply someone who uses computer or hand-held device for writing, you need to read this blog post – your life is about to
The full text of Fermat's statement, written in Latin, reads "Cubum autem in duos cubos, aut quadrato-quadratum in duos quadrato-quadratos, et generaliter nullam in infinitum ultra quadratum potestatem in duos eiusdem nominis fas est dividere cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet." The English translation is:
There is a well-known Russian saying that goes “Если нельзя, но очень хочется, то можно.” The English translation of it can span anywhere from “If you can’t, but want it badly, then you can” to “If you shouldn’t, but want it badly, then you should” to “If you may not,
Small matters matter. Imagine saving (or spending wisely) just 1 second of your time every hour. One measly second! During your lifespan you would save or spend wisely (1 sec-an-hour * 24 hours-a-day * 365 days-a-year * 100 years) / (3600 seconds-an-hour * 24 hours-a-day) = 10 days, a whole
The title of this post borrows from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 comedy “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” It stars the great Peter Sellers as the titular character as well as George C. Scott and Slim Pickens. The black and white film is strange
"Where do you go to get help with SAS?" It's a question I've asked users more times than I can remember. Some will tell me they take a SAS class or call SAS Technical Support, but the most common answer is "colleagues." There's no doubt fellow users are a great resource, but if you're only relying on colleagues at your
Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen, has excellent ideas on organizing your information so it is effective and interesting. One tip is “Start with the End in Mind” – what is the purpose of your presentation? What do you want the audience to walk away knowing?
Windows 8 was officially released Friday October 26. This was Microsoft’s first operating system release since the introduction of Apple’s iPad and the subsequent surge in popularity of tablets. To align their OS with the new computing devices, Windows 8 has two interfaces to allow access from traditional desktops and laptops and
Kirk Paul Lafler, Software Intelligence Corporation, has written four SAS books and more than 500 peer-reviewed papers - 19 of which were awarded Best Contributed Papers or Poster, so I’m going to believe him when he says that he’s figured out a thing or two about tuning SAS systems.
