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Rick WicklinMay 7, 2012 0

Checking your answers: Are computed values close to the true values?

In statistical programming, I often test a program by running it on a problem for which I know the correct answer. I often use a single expression to compute the maximum value of the absolute difference between the vectors: maxDiff = max( abs( z-correct ) ); /* largest absolute difference

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Advanced Analytics | SAS Events

Waynette TubbsMay 4, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - A trend, fraud sniffer

Jenn Sykes (you probably remember her from this great sentiment analysis post last year about American Idol), presented Predicting Electoral Outcomes with SAS® Sentiment Analysis and SAS® Forecast Studio at SAS Global Forum 2012. In addition to predicting elections, Sykes tells Anna Brown from Inside SAS Global Forum, that there is a lot of unstructured data

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Rick WicklinMay 4, 2012 0

Expand data by using frequencies

A reader asked: I want to create a vector as follows. Suppose there are two given vectors x=[A B C] and f=[1 2 3]. Here f indicates the frequency vector. I hope to generate a vector c=[A B B C C C]. I am trying to use the REPEAT function

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Rick WicklinMay 2, 2012 0

The DIF function: Compute lagged differences and finite differences

To a statistician, the DIF function (which was introduced in SAS/IML 9.22) is useful for time series analysis. To a numerical analyst and a statistical programmer, the function has many other uses, including computing finite differences. The DIF function computes the difference between the original vector and a shifted version

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Rick WicklinApril 30, 2012 0

The LAG function: Useful for more than time series analysis

To a statistician, the LAG function (which was introduced in SAS/IML 9.22) is useful for time series analysis. To a numerical analyst and a statistical programmer, the function provides a convenient way to compute quantitites that involve adjacent values in any vector. The LAG function is essentially a "shift operator."

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Advanced Analytics | SAS Events

Waynette TubbsApril 27, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - One step ahead of fraudsters

As always, SAS Global Forum holds a wealth of inspiration. The conversations that I have with you guys while I'm there almost always start with, "I just heard/saw/read the coolest thing. I can't wait to get home and get started using this!" For those of you who missed this year's

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallApril 20, 2012 0

What would SAS Stored Process Key #51 be?

This past Monday, Tricia and I released our 2nd book this year. "The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes" provides a step-by-step approach to transitioning from SAS code into user driven (prompted) stored processes. Trimming down all the things you can do with SAS Stored Processes is next to

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Rick WicklinApril 20, 2012 0

Popular! Articles that strike a chord with SAS users

I blog about a lot of topics, but the following five categories represent some of my favorite subjects. Judging by the number of readers and comments, these articles have struck a chord with SAS users. If you haven't read them, check them out. (If you HAVE read them, some are

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallApril 16, 2012 0

All the possible uses for PROC STP

PROC STP is a new procedure for SAS 9.3 Stored Processes. It's so new and different that I have not had the opportunity to use it yet in a customer engagement. When writing about it for the now released "The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes" book, I had

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Carpenter's Guide to Innovative SAS Techniques

Waynette TubbsApril 13, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - A chapter from the book

Today, I have truly taken a chapter from the book - perhaps in more ways than one. I happened to notice that Art Carpenter's most recent book is titled, "Carpenter's Guide to Innovative SAS Techniques." Of course, you know that linking innovation and SAS are going to be a trigger

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Waynette TubbsApril 6, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - ROI-focused marketing, predictive analytics

A small, North American marketing firm (a division of a much larger international firm that provides data-driven, multichannel marketing solutions) provides its clients with "effective one-to-one marketing and ROI-focused strategies by applying advanced predictive analytics."

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Advanced Analytics | SAS Events

Waynette TubbsMarch 30, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Get a real job

There may be some of you who don't remember this song, but in high school and early college it was one of my favorites. "Get a haircut and get a real job," by George Thorogood and the Destroyers, really spoke to the rebel in me. Most of my rebellious days are behind

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Waynette TubbsMarch 23, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Cutting steps with DATA step

I think this DATA step Post-It author may be a bit like my mother. When I was a child, my mother was always coaching me on two things: being independent and being efficient. I believe those are the two traits she considered most admirable in a person. It's little wonder

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Waynette TubbsMarch 16, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Tracking competitive zeal

You can keep track of and report anything with SAS, even motivation - or the lack thereof. This team has developed a portal to analyze and report their ride data. It could just as easily be used for groups who want to work together to lose a few pounds, train

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallMarch 16, 2012 0

Stop recreating the wheel, save those common joins into a permanent view

When you are constantly taking the data tables and completing joins to begin working on your reports or analysis it might be time to consider creating permanent views. Then you can just add the view to the Enterprise Guide project rather than dealing with the joins in a Query Builder

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallMarch 14, 2012 0

Why code when %_eg_WhereParam does the work for you?

After unwittingly getting involved recently in a code vs GUI discussion another pro GUI vote came in yesterday when presenting to a customer's internal user group. When creating and using prompts in SAS Enterprise Guide, it is a no-brainer to recommend leveraging the %_eg_WhereParam as it handles all the special

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Robert AllisonMarch 9, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - SAS/Graph®'s secret message

Sometimes, I pick something fun to do with SAS/GRAPH so that I can learn and experiment with some of the more obscure functionality that I'm wanting to master. This is one of those situations. This fun graph allowed me to experiment with crosshatch patterns in maps, overlapping map areas and creating 'holes' in maps.

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Get a quick summary of your data using this task.

Angela HallMarch 7, 2012 0

Use SAS Enterprise Guide to quickly understand a new data set

During IFSUG yesterday, Sunil Gupta gave attendees to his presentation a special homework assignment. Look into the SAS Enterprise Guide task 'Characterize Data'. Sunil suggested that this was a simple approach to quickly getting a summary of all the variables within your data table. Of course, some programmers will use

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallMarch 6, 2012 0

A poor man's approach to fuzzy data matching

Today at IFSUG, Chuck Patridge presented a wonderful talk about how to complete fuzzy matching using BASE SAS tools. Chuck has been programming SAS since 1979 and has been tasked multiple times with coming up with in-house solutions to address business needs without the software costs that are typically associated

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Waynette TubbsMarch 2, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Do you speak English?

If you've never lived outside of your own small town, you might not realize that each country has a distinct way of writing and formatting currency and numbers. This can be a real problem when working with data and code - I'll bet some of you are already aware of

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Waynette TubbsFebruary 24, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Mining customer satisfaction

How are you determining customer satisfaction? How do you move the needle? This SAS user mines the unstructured data in patient surveys with SAS Text Miner.

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallFebruary 22, 2012 0

To be or not to be, testing your cube's existence

Unlike BASE SAS tables, OLAP cubes must exist in within the metadata in order to access from any of the OLAP Viewers. In addition to having some metadata OLAP cubes have a physical file structure presence (at least for MOLAP/HOLAP because it's a different story for ROLAP). When you refresh

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Waynette TubbsFebruary 17, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Prevalence data analysis

When I read the way that this user is working with SAS, I took a look around support.sas.com to find examples to allow you to work with your own data. (Take a look at this.) If this example isn't quite right for you, plug in your own key words.

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What is Mahalanobis distance?

Rick WicklinFebruary 15, 2012 0

What is Mahalanobis distance?

I previously described how to use Mahalanobis distance to find outliers in multivariate data. This article takes a closer look at Mahalanobis distance. A subsequent article will describe how you can compute Mahalanobis distance. Distance in standard units In statistics, we sometimes measure "nearness" or "farness" in terms of the

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Waynette TubbsFebruary 10, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Big data

Big data is one of the hottest topics in business. When you hear those words - BIG Data - you almost surely think of: HUGE financial services firms scoring terabytes of historical and current risk data GLOBAL telecommunications companies mining petabytes of structured and unstructured data INTERNATIONAL retailers repricing hundreds of thousands of products across

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallFebruary 9, 2012 0

Best practices for refreshing production OLAP cubes

Unlike prior versions of SAS OLAP technology, 9.2 provides more options for maintaining and refreshing OLAP cubes. With this comes some discussion about what each one does alone, and how pairing these techniques really provides SAS OLAP Server Administrators and cube developers a cornucopia of OLAP options. PROC OLAPOPERATE Remember

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Use the Cholesky transformation to correlate and uncorrelate variables

Rick WicklinFebruary 8, 2012 0

Use the Cholesky transformation to correlate and uncorrelate variables

A variance-covariance matrix expresses linear relationships between variables. Given the covariances between variables, did you know that you can write down an invertible linear transformation that "uncorrelates" the variables? Conversely, you can transform a set of uncorrelated variables into variables with given covariances. The transformation that works this magic is

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Waynette TubbsJanuary 27, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Surface complexation modeling

What is surface complexation? Everyday I have to look something up on Google or in the dictionary. For example, do you know what a Cthulhu is? I had to search for that term after I tweeted that I thought a SAS surface plot graph was beautiful. Mike Nemecek from SAS

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Waynette TubbsJanuary 20, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Data miners slow churn

Churn is a huge concern for insurers, credit card providers and telecommunications companies - even utilities. This Post-It Note author says that his company has found a way to reduce customer turnover - churn - by 10 percent using SAS Data Miner.

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Waynette TubbsJanuary 13, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Feeling lucky?

It's Friday the 13. That can conjure up all kinds of scary thoughts, or you might consider it a lucky day. Which is it for you? This SAS user doesn't rely on luck or chance with his or her important projects. SAS is used to predict failures and outages!

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