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Programming Tips

Strengthen your programming skills with tips and techniques from the experts

Programming Tips

Peter Styliadis

Peter StyliadisSeptember 23, 2021 0

CAS-Action! Simply Distinct - Part 2

In my previous post CAS-Action! Simply Distinct - Part 1 I reviewed using the simple.distinct CAS action to explore distinct and missing values in a distributed CAS table. Welcome back to my SAS Users blog series CAS Action! - a series on fundamentals. I've broken the series into logical, consumable

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Analytics | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 22, 2021 0

Use simulations to evaluate the accuracy of asymptotic results

The field of probability and statistics is full of asymptotic results. The Law of Large Numbers and the Central Limit Theorem are two famous examples. An asymptotic result can be both a blessing and a curse. For example, consider a result that says that the distribution of some statistic converges

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Programming Tips

Ron CodySeptember 21, 2021 0

Fuzzy Matching

The term "fuzzy matching" describes a method of comparing two strings that might have slight differences, such as misspelling or a middle initial in a name included or not included. One of my favorite functions to compare the "closeness" of two strings is the SPEDIS (spelling distance) function. Have you

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 20, 2021 0

Add an item to a sublist

The SAS/IML language supports lists, which are containers that store other objects, such as matrices and other lists. A primary use of lists is to pack objects of various types into a single symbol that can be passed to and from modules. A useful feature of using lists is that

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Programming Tips

Peter Styliadis

Peter StyliadisSeptember 15, 2021 0

CAS-Action! Simply Distinct - Part 1

Welcome back to my SAS Users blog series CAS Action! - a series on fundamentals. I've broken the series into logical, consumable parts. If you'd like to start by learning a little more about what CAS Actions are, please see CAS Actions and Action Sets - a brief intro. Or

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Analytics | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 15, 2021 0

The partition problem: An optimization approach

I previously wrote about one way to solve the partition problem in SAS. In the partition problem, you divide (or partition) a set of N items into two groups of size k and N-k such that the sum of the items' weights is the same in each group. For example,

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips | Students & Educators

Suzanne MorgenSeptember 13, 2021 0

Top Books for SAS Programmers

The Day of the Programmer is not enough time to celebrate our favorite code-creators. That’s why at SAS, we celebrate an entire week with SAS Programmer Week! If you want to extend the fun and learning of SAS Programmer Week year-round, SAS Press is here to support you with books

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Analytics | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 13, 2021 0

The partition problem

The partition problem has many variations, but recently I encountered it as an interactive puzzle on a computer. (Try a similar game yourself!) The player is presented with an old-fashioned pan-balance scale and a set of objects of different weights. The challenge is to divide (or partition) the objects into

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Data for Good | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonSeptember 2, 2021 0

Cary NC data - weather

Many cities have Open Data pages. But once you download the data, what can you do with it? This is my sixth in a series of blog posts where I download public data about Cary, NC, and demonstrate how you might analyze that type of data (for Cary, or any

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Leonid BatkhanSeptember 2, 2021 0

Removing trailing characters from SAS strings

SAS' Leonid Batkhan shows how to cut away ANY unwanted trailing characters (not just blanks) from SAS text strings to clean up your data.

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 1, 2021 0

On the number of bootstrap samples

The number of possible bootstrap samples for a sample of size N is big. Really big. Recall that the bootstrap method is a powerful way to analyze the variation in a statistic. To implement the standard bootstrap method, you generate B random bootstrap samples. A bootstrap sample is a sample

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Data for Good | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonAugust 31, 2021 0

Cary NC data - parks and trails

Many cities have Open Data pages. But once you download the data, what can you do with it? This is my fifth in a series of blog posts where I download public data about Cary, NC, and demonstrate how you might analyze that type of data (for Cary, or any

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 30, 2021 0

Bootstrap correlation coefficients in SAS

You can use the bootstrap method to estimate confidence intervals. Unlike formulas, which assume that the data are drawn from a specified distribution (usually the normal distribution), the bootstrap method does not assume a distribution for the data. There are many articles about how to use SAS to bootstrap statistics

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Programming Tips

Peter Styliadis

Peter StyliadisAugust 27, 2021 0

CAS-Action! Show me the ColumnInfo!

Welcome back to my SAS Users blog series CAS Action! - a series on fundamentals. I've broken the series into logical, consumable parts. If you'd like to start by learning a little more about what CAS Actions are, please see CAS Actions and Action Sets - a brief intro. Or

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 25, 2021 0

Convert a symmetric matrix from wide to long form

For graphing multivariate data, it is important to be able to convert the data between "wide form" (a separate column for each variable) and "long form" (which contains an indicator variable that assigns a group to each observation). If the data are numeric, the wide data can be represented as

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Data for Good | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonAugust 23, 2021 0

Cary NC data - population

Many cities have Open Data pages. But once you download the data, what can you do with it? This is my fourth in a series of blog posts where I download public data about Cary, NC, and demonstrate how you might analyze that type of data (for Cary, or any

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Leonid BatkhanAugust 23, 2021 0

Removing leading characters from SAS strings

SAS' Leonid Batkhan shows you how to remove ANY leading characters (not just blanks) from text strings to tidy up your data.

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Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 23, 2021 0

Sliced survival graphs in SAS

This article shows how to create a "sliced survival plot" for proportional-hazards models that are created by using PROC PHREG in SAS. Graphing the result of a statistical regression model is a valuable way to communicate the predictions of the model. Many SAS procedures use ODS graphics to produce graphs

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Data for Good | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonAugust 19, 2021 0

Cary NC data - streetlights

Many cities have Open Data pages. But once you download the data, what can you do with it? This is my third in a series of blog posts where I download several datasets from Cary, NC's open data page, and give you a few ideas to get you started on

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Programming Tips

Peter Styliadis

Peter StyliadisAugust 19, 2021 0

CAS-Action! fetch CAS, fetch! - Part 2

In Part 1 of my series fetch CAS, fetch!, I executed the fetch CAS action to return rows from a CAS table. That was great, but what can you do with the results? Maybe you want to create a visualization that includes the top five cars by MSRP for all

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Data for Good | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonAugust 17, 2021 0

Cary NC data - fire incidents

Many cities have Open Data pages. But once you download the data, what can you do with it? This is my second blog post where I download several datasets from Cary, NC's open data page, and and give you a few ideas to get you started on your own data

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Programming Tips

Martin MinceyAugust 17, 2021 0

How to create EMF graph output files that can be edited outside of your SAS® program

What happens if you need to edit graph output files from SAS in a different application (for example, Microsoft Word)? It is not recommended that you edit your SAS graph output outside of SAS, but, if you must do so, you need to create your graphics output as EMF (Enhanced Metafile Format) graph output.

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Programming Tips

Figure 1. Sample document

Daria Rostovtseva

Daria RostovtsevaAugust 16, 2021 0

Classifying messy documents: A common-sense approach (Part II)

In Part I of this blog post, I provided an overview of the approach my team and I took tackling the problem of classifying diverse, messy documents at scale. I shared the details of how we chose to preprocess the data and how we created features from documents of interest

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Programming Tips

Peter Styliadis

Peter StyliadisAugust 12, 2021 0

CAS-Action! fetch CAS, fetch! - Part 1

Welcome to my SAS Users blog series CAS Action! - a series on fundamentals. I've broken the series into logical, consumable parts. If you'd like to start by learning a little more about what CAS Actions are, please see CAS Actions and Action Sets - a brief intro. Or if

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 11, 2021 0

More on the SWEEP operator for least-square regression models

One of the benefits of using the SWEEP operator is that it enables you to "sweep in" columns (add effects to a model) in any order. This article shows that if you use the SWEEP operator, you can compute a SSCP matrix and use it repeatedly to estimate any linear

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Programming Tips

Ron CodyAugust 10, 2021 0

How to Transform a Skewed Distribution to a Uniform Distribution

This post demonstrates how to rank data and how to place these ranks into roughly equal groups. There are certain variables, such as annual salary, that are highly skewed. There are many who earn between $50,00 and $150,000, but some who earn millions or hundreds of millions of dollars a

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 9, 2021 0

Never multiply with a large permutation matrix

Do you ever use a permutation matrix to change the order of rows or columns in a matrix? Did you know that there is a more efficient way in matrix-oriented languages such as SAS/IML, MATLAB, and R? Remember the following tip: Never multiply with a large permutation matrix! Instead, use

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Programming Tips

Peter Styliadis

Peter StyliadisAugust 6, 2021 0

CAS Actions and Action Sets - a brief intro

I'm excited to curate a series of posts focused on CAS Actions. However, before I dive into details and code, I thought I'd take a moment to lay a foundation for a better understanding of CAS and CAS actions. I'll cover things here at a high level as there's quite

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Programming Tips

Peter Styliadis

Peter StyliadisAugust 6, 2021 0

CAS Action! - a series on fundamentals

I'm excited to bring a series of posts centered on CAS Actions. The topics in the list below will be covered in posts set to publish in the next few weeks. Please check back often for new releases. CAS Actions and Action Sets - a brief intro - Introduction to the

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