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Programming Tips

Strengthen your programming skills with tips and techniques from the experts

Programming Tips | SAS Events

Lexi HawksAugust 13, 2018 0

A quick introduction to CAS in SAS Viya

Data in the cloud makes it easily accessible, and can help businesses run more smoothly. SAS Viya runs its calculations on Cloud Analytics Service (CAS). David Shannon of Amadeus Software spoke at SAS Global Forum 2018 on his paper, Come On, Baby, Light my SAS Viya: Programming for CAS.

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Data Visualization | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonAugust 10, 2018 0

Survey says! .... US voters are _________.

Elections are in the news again, therefore I have been on the lookout for interesting graphs. I recently found some graphs of the Census Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration Supplement data, and tried to improve them. Follow along if you're interested in voter data, or creating better graphs!

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Don HendersonAugust 9, 2018 0

Five things you (probably) don’t know you can do with a hash table

Hash tables are a very powerful and flexible data structure. Most SAS applications of hash tables focus on just one of their many powerful facilities: table lookup. Hash tables are a fantastic table lookup tool and their use for that should never be diminished. However, hash tables can do so

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Data Management | Data Visualization | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonAugust 8, 2018 0

Fact checking a reddit post about GDP

I peruse many different websites to get my news, and I always keep an eye out for good (or bad) presentations of data. I recently saw a posting on reddit claiming "U.S. GDP is greater than the total of all others combined." This news seemed too good to be true

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 8, 2018 0

Plot curves for levels of two categorical variables in SAS

The SGPLOT procedure in SAS makes it easy to create graphs that overlay various groups in the data. Many statements support the GROUP= option, which specifies that the graph should overlay group information. For example, you can create side-by-side bar charts and box plots, and you can overlay multiple scatter

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonAugust 6, 2018 0

Choose your markers carefully! (for scatter plots, that is)

There are many quotes with words of wisdom to help you live your life. But sometimes one quote seems to contradict another. For example, "Don't sweat the small stuff." ... and "The devil is in the details." When it comes to creating graphs (and perhaps living my life in general),

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 6, 2018 0

How to score and graph a quantile regression model in SAS

This article shows how to score (evaluate) a quantile regression model on new data. SAS supports several procedures for quantile regression, including the QUANTREG, QUANTSELECT, and HPQUANTSELECT procedures. The first two procedures do not support any of the modern methods for scoring regression models, so you must use the "missing

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Data Management | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonAugust 2, 2018 0

Cumulative values - "We can do this the easy way, or the hard way..."

In many movies, there is often a scene where the star says "We can do this the easy way, or the hard way" (and the hard way usually involves quite a bit of pain). So it is with interrogations ... and so it is with writing SAS code! Today I'm

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Sports & Entertainment

Learn SAS | Programming Tips | SAS Events

Lexi HawksAugust 2, 2018 0

How SAS Viya uses REST APIs to integrate with Python

SAS Viya has opened an entirely new set of capabilities, allowing SAS to analyze on cloud technology in real-time. One of the best new features of SAS Viya is its ability to pair with open source platforms, allowing developers the freedom of language and implementation to integrate with the power

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonAugust 1, 2018 0

SAS graphs and Excel data, from Unix!

I started my computer career as a Unix system administrator, and when I began using SAS almost 30 years ago it was only natural that I used it on Unix computers (they were the most powerful/capable computers I had access to at the time). I've picked up a lot of

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Government | Travel

Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonJuly 30, 2018 0

What's the most popular language in each US state?

I can recognize several languages when I hear people speaking them (mostly because I lived in the Alexander International Dorm at NC State University). Therefore when I found a map of the most common languages spoken in each US state, it caught my attention, and I decided to try creating my

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Education | Government | Travel

Analytics | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJuly 30, 2018 0

Meaningful names for columns of a design matrix

A programmer recently asked a question on a SAS discussion forum about design matrices for categorical variables. He had generated a design matrix by using PROC GLMMOD and wanted to use the design columns in a subsequent procedure. However, the columns were named COL1, COL2, COL3,..., so he couldn't tell

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Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonJuly 26, 2018 0

Speed -vs- stability? ... let's graph it!

As you might have guessed from some of my previous blog posts, I'm an avid paddler. I like to paddle boats, and I like to try to go fast! And when I'm considering buying a new boat, it's only natural that I would analyze the data to make an informed

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Sports & Entertainment

Advanced Analytics | Programming Tips

Emily GaoJuly 26, 2018 0

How to tokenize documents into sentences

SAS Visual Analytics includes text parsing actions that can help tokenize sentences, and SAS Visual Text Analytics provides even better, more sophisticated methods. This article contains code samples and cites papers for more details.

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Jane EslingerJuly 25, 2018 0

Fun with Dots in PROC REPORT

You should play a little. Add dots. Add color. Your PROC REPORT output does not have to be boring. As a matter of fact, it can be both functional and appealing. Any Unicode value will do, but this blog shows how to use the Unicode value for a dot (filled

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Joe FurbeeJuly 25, 2018 0

Using RStudio with SAS Viya

Getting started with SAS Viya and RStudio -- making the connection, and submitting my first commands via CAS actions.

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJuly 25, 2018 0

Color cells in a mosaic plot by deviation from independence

Back in SAS 9.3M2 (SAS/STAT 12.1), PROC FREQ introduced mosaic plots to visualize the joint frequencies in a contingency table. By default, the cells in a mosaic plot are colored according to levels of one of the categorical variables in the analysis. However, in 2013 I showed how you can

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonJuly 24, 2018 0

Using X-ray glasses to see patterns in your data!

When you were a kid, were you intrigued by the 99-cent X-ray glasses advertised in the back of the comic books? If you ordered those glasses, you were probably disappointed. Now that you're an adult, how would you like to use computer techniques to "X-ray" your data and look for

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Sports & Entertainment

Analytics | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJuly 23, 2018 0

How to use the %BOOT and %BOOTCI macros in SAS

Since the late 1990s, SAS has supplied macros for basic bootstrap and jackknife analyses. This article provides an example that shows how to use the %BOOT and %BOOTCI macros. The %BOOT macro generates a bootstrap distribution and computes basic statistics about the bootstrap distribution, including estimates of bias, standard error,

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Data Management | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonJuly 20, 2018 0

Import Excel data, transpose, and plot it!

Of course you know how to create graphs ... But do you often find that preparing the data to plot is often the hardest part? Well then, this blog post is for you! I'll be demonstrating how to import Excel data into SAS, transpose the data, use what were formerly column

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Banking | Education | Government

Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJuly 20, 2018 0

SAS code golf: find the max digit in a string of digits

"Code golf" is a fun programming pastime that challenges you to solve a problem with the least amount of code possible. Like regular golf, the goal is to use fewest code "strokes" to hit the mark. Here's a recent challenge that was posted to me via Twitter. @cjdinger @SASJedi got

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Kathryn McLawhornJuly 19, 2018 0

Keeping the top frequency count (n) for each character variable in a SAS data set

Which character variables have the highest frequency count? You can easily determine this using a variety of procedures that calculate frequency count. For example, the FREQ Procedure or the MEANS Procedure. This blog post illustrates this process through two examples.

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Advanced Analytics | Programming Tips

Donut chart of cluster samples

Emily GaoJuly 18, 2018 0

How to sample textual data with SAS

See how to sample unstructured (text) data using SAS Viya and CAS actions. This post includes complete code to cluster the text documents via k-means, and treats the cluster memberships as strata for analysis.

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJuly 18, 2018 0

Balanced bootstrap resampling in SAS

This article shows how to implement balanced bootstrap sampling in SAS. The basic bootstrap samples with replacement from the original data (N observations) to obtain B new samples. This is called "uniform" resampling because each observation has a uniform probability of 1/N of being selected at each step of the

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Data Management | Learn SAS | Programming Tips | SAS Administrators

Leonid BatkhanJuly 17, 2018 0

SAS administrators tip: Automatically deleting old SAS logs

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.

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJuly 16, 2018 0

Offset regions: Find all points within a specified distance from a polygon

My colleague Robert Allison recently blogged about using the diameter of Texas as a unit of measurement. The largest distance across Texas is about 801 miles, so Robert wanted to find the set of all points such that the distance from the point to Texas is less than or equal

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Warren F. KuhfeldJuly 13, 2018 0

Advanced ODS Graphics: PROC SGPLOT, BY groups, and SG annotation

You can use PROC SGPLOT, BY variables, and a SG annotation data set together to put separate annotation into each BY group. However, you need two more steps to make it happen. This post shows all of the steps necessary to put different annotations into each graph when you have a BY variable.

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Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonJuly 12, 2018 0

How old is your county?

The United States declared independence in 1776, and we celebrate it on July 4th every year. But the land areas that make up the United States today weren't necessarily the same as they were back then. So I thought it would be interesting to create a map showing when each

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Government | Travel

Advanced Analytics | Programming Tips

Emily GaoJuly 12, 2018 0

How to calculate Word Mover's Distance with SAS

Word Mover's Distance (WMD) is a distance metric used to measure the dissimilarity between two documents, and its application in text analytics was introduced by a research group from Washington University in 2015. The group's paper, From Word Embeddings To Document Distances, was published on the 32nd International Conference on Machine

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJuly 11, 2018 0

The probability that two random chords of a circle intersect

In a previous article, I showed how to find the intersection (if it exists) between two line segments in the plane. There are some fun problems in probability theory that involve intersections of line segments. One is "What is the probability that two randomly chosen chords of a circle intersect?"

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