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Rick WicklinMay 29, 2012 0

Did you know that PROC IML automatically loads certain modules?

In the SAS/IML language, a user-defined function or subroutine is called a module. Modules are used to extend the capability of the SAS/IML language. Usually you need to explicitly load modules before you use them, but there are two cases where PROC IML loads a module automatically. Modules in IMLMLIB

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Waynette TubbsMay 25, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Put up or shut up

Put up or shut up is one of those great sayings from my generation. Loosely translated it means, stop complaining if you aren't going to do something about the problem. In this week's Innovation Inspiration, the author decided to teach American middle schoolers how to question the information that they

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Rick WicklinMay 23, 2012 0

Compute statistics for each row by using subscript operators

In a previous blog, I showed how to use SAS/IML subscript reduction operators to compute the location of the maximum values for each row of a matrix. The subscript reduction operators are useful for computing simple statistics for each row (or column) of a numerical matrix. If x is a

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Waynette TubbsMay 18, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Jenine Milum creates a report

At SAS Global Forum, one of the most difficult areas for me to show to you are the poster presentations. This year, I asked Steve Polilli, a colleague who is great with a Flipcam, to video a few for me. I picked out three that I will use in the

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Waynette TubbsMay 11, 2012 0

Friday's Innovation Inspiration - High schoolers analyzing high schoolers

Part of what captivated me about this paper and poster presentation were the presenters - these guys are high school kids using SAS to do a visual analysis of Internet use by high schoolers. The idea was so compelling that Anna Brown and Inside SAS Global Forum went to talk

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Rick WicklinMay 9, 2012 0

The power method: compute only the largest eigenvalue of a matrix

When I was at SAS Global Forum last week, a SAS user asked my advice regarding a SAS/IML program that he wrote. One step of the program was taking too long to run and he wondered if I could suggest a way to speed it up. The long-running step was

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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