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Programming Tips

Strengthen your programming skills with tips and techniques from the experts

Programming Tips | Work & Life at SAS

Gavin DaySeptember 8, 2020 0

Inclusive terminology: Knowing better, doing better

Inclusion and diversity are strengths. The SAS company culture is built on a foundation of caring for one another and holding ourselves and others accountable. That includes recognition and accountability for where we can improve. Our work of inclusivity is evolving and continuous. We must frequently re-examine the way we speak, act

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 8, 2020 0

Matrix balancing: Update matrix cells to match row and column sums

Matrix balancing is an interesting problem that has a long history. Matrix balancing refers to adjusting the cells of a frequency table to match known values of the row and column sums. One of the early algorithms for matrix balancing is known as the RAS algorithm, but it is also

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Programming Tips

Jody CarltonSeptember 7, 2020 0

Using locale-specific format catalogs to create reports in multiple languages

This blog post, inspired by my work on this topic with a SAS customer, focuses on how to create and use locale-specific informats to read in numeric values from a Microsoft Excel file and then transform them into SAS character values. I incorporated this step into a macro that transforms ones and zeroes from the Excel file into meaningful information for multilingual readers.

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerSeptember 4, 2020 0

Using SAS to convert IP addresses into numerical IP values

As citizens of the Internet, we are all familiar with IP addresses -- probably more so than our Internet founding fathers had ever intended. These addresses are typically represented in a 4-piece segmented list of numbers separated by dots. Here is an example: "149.173.5.120". Each segment is called an octet

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Programming Tips

Aubrey BarfieldSeptember 2, 2020 0

All hail the SAS programmer!

SAS offering free learning resources in celebration of programmers For more than 40 years, SAS programmers have crafted software and solutions that transform the world. From statistics to data science, to analytics and artificial intelligence, people writing code have architected a new economy with incredible opportunities. SAS Programmer Week honors

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 2, 2020 0

The HighLow plot: When a stacked bar chart is not enough

The HighLow plot often enables you to create many custom plots without resorting to annotation. Although it is designed to create a candlestick chart for stocks, it is incredibly versatile. Recently, a SAS programmer wanted to create a patient-profile graph that looked like a stacked bar chart but had repeated

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Programming Tips

Tara St. ClairAugust 31, 2020 0

Building custom apps on top of SAS Viya, Part One: Where's the value?

This series is geared towards walking you through a piece of the puzzle of operationalizing your analytics: securely integrating your custom applications into your SAS Viya platform. This is particularly useful after exposing your analytics as HTTP REST APIs, as we'll see an intentionally brief example of in this first

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 31, 2020 0

The best way to generate dummy variables in SAS

On discussion forums, many SAS programmers ask about the best way to generate dummy variables for categorical variables. Well-meaning responders offer all sorts of advice, including writing your own DATA step program, sometimes mixed with macro programming. This article shows that the simplest and easiest way to generate dummy variables

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Advanced Analytics | Machine Learning | Programming Tips

James Gearheart

James GearheartAugust 27, 2020 0

Build a decision tree in SAS

Decision trees are a fundamental machine learning technique that every data scientist should know. Luckily, the construction and implementation of decision trees in SAS is straightforward and easy to produce. There are simply three sections to review for the development of decision trees: Data Tree development Model evaluation Data The

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Mariana Fontanezi

Mariana FontaneziAugust 26, 2020 0

Time Series Modeling: R & SAS

Como integrar modelos hierárquicos de séries temporais desenvolvidos em R ao SAS Visual Forecasting analisando as diferentes estratégias? O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar como podemos executar modelos de séries temporais, que foram desenvolvidos no R, no SAS Visual Forecasting, podendo, assim, paralelizar e acelerar o processamento do código R.

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Brazilian Portuguese

Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 26, 2020 0

Rewinding random number streams: An application

In the paper "Tips and Techniques for Using the Random-Number Generators in SAS" (Sarle and Wicklin, 2018), I discussed an example that uses the new STREAMREWIND subroutine in Base SAS 9.4M5. As its name implies, the STREAMREWIND subroutine rewinds a random number stream, essentially resetting the stream to the beginning.

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 24, 2020 0

How does PROC FCMP store functions?

I got a lot of feedback about my recent article about how to find roots of nonlinear functions by using the SOLVE function in PROC FCMP. A colleague asked how the FCMP procedure stores the functions. Specifically, why the OUTLIB= option on the PROC FCMP statement use a three-level syntax:

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Cindy WangAugust 20, 2020 0

Discover Visual Analytics Report Paths with REST APIs

SAS Viya is an open analytics platform accessible from interfaces or various coding languages. REST API is one of the widely used interfaces. Multiple resources exist on how to access SAS Visual Analytics reports using SAS Viya REST API. For example Programmatically listing data sources in SAS Visual Analytics by

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 19, 2020 0

Find the root of a function by using the SAS DATA step

Finding the root (or zero) of a nonlinear function is an important computational task. In the case of a one-variable function, you can use the SOLVE function in PROC FCMP to find roots of nonlinear functions in the DATA step. This article shows how to use the SOLVE function to

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Advanced Analytics | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 17, 2020 0

Estimate a power curve in parallel in SAS Viya

I recently showed how to use simulation to estimate the power of a statistical hypothesis test. The example (a two-sample t test for the difference of means) is a simple SAS/IML module that is very fast. Fast is good because often you want to perform a sequence of simulations over

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Data Management | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Leonid BatkhanAugust 12, 2020 0

Expanding lengths of all character variables in SAS data sets

SAS' Leonid Batkhan reveals how to change lengths for all character variables in a data set and all data sets in a data library to facilitate data migration to Unicode encoding environment.

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 12, 2020 0

Use simulation to estimate the power of a statistical test

A previous article about standardizing data in groups shows how to simulate data from two groups. One sample (with n1=20 observations) is simulated from an N(15, 5) distribution whereas a second (with n2=30 observations) is simulated from an N(16, 5) distribution. The sample means of the two groups are close

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rebecca Ottesen

Rebecca OttesenAugust 10, 2020 0

Learning to think like SAS

The most fundamental concept that students learning introductory SAS programming must master is how SAS handles data. This might seem like an obvious statement, but it is often overlooked by students in their rush to produce code that works. I often tell my class to step back for a moment

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 10, 2020 0

4 ways to standardize data in SAS

A common operation in statistical data analysis is to center and scale a numerical variable. This operation is conceptually easy: you subtract the mean of the variable and divide by the variable's standard deviation. Recently, I wanted to perform a slight variation of the usual standardization: Perform a different standardization

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 5, 2020 0

Submatrices of matrices

Have you ever seen the "brain teaser" for children that shows a 4 x 4 grid and asks "how many squares of any size are in this grid?" To solve this problem, the reader must recognize that there are sixteen 1 x 1 squares, nine 2 x 2 squares, four 3 x 3 squares, and one 4 x 4 square.

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 3, 2020 0

Run tasks in parallel in SAS Viya

The iml action was introduced in Viya 3.5. As shown in a previous article, the iml action supports ways to implement the map-reduce paradigm, which is a way to distribute a computation by using multiple threads. The map-reduce paradigm is ideal for “embarrassingly parallel” computations, which are composed of many

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Programming Tips

Bari LawhornJuly 30, 2020 0

How to translate your cURL command into SAS code

You want to use an API to retrieve data and process it with SAS. How do you do it? PROC HTTP offers the features of the cURL command within your SAS code.

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJuly 29, 2020 0

Simulate regression models that incorporate CLASS parameterizations

When you write a program that simulates data from a statistical model, you should always check that the simulation code is correct. One way to do this is to generate a large simulated sample, estimate the parameters in the simulated data, and make sure that the estimates are close to

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJuly 27, 2020 0

8 ways to use the Kronecker product

The Kronecker product (also called the direct product) is a binary operation that combines two matrices to form a new matrix. The Kronecker product appears in textbooks about the design of experiments and multivariate statistics. The Kronecker product seems intimidating at first, but often one of the matrices in the

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Data Management | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Leonid BatkhanJuly 23, 2020 0

Splitting a data set into smaller data sets

SAS' Leonid Batkhan shows you how to split a large data set into many by a subsetting by a number of observations to produce smaller, better manageable data sets.

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Advanced Analytics | Machine Learning | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJuly 23, 2020 0

Fit a multivariate Gaussian mixture model by using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm

Last month a SAS programmer asked how to fit a multivariate Gaussian mixture model in SAS. For univariate data, you can use the FMM Procedure, which fits a large variety of finite mixture models. If your company is using SAS Viya, you can use the MBC or GMM procedures, which

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Programming Tips

Steven SoberJuly 21, 2020 0

How to create a path-based CASLIB to SASWORK for speedier analysis with SAS® Viya®

Is there programmatic way to reduce memory requirements of a CAS table in SAS® Viya®? Yes! SAS' Steven Sober shows you how.

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJuly 20, 2020 0

Compute within-group multivariate statistics and store them in a list

I recently showed how to compute within-group multivariate statistics by using the SAS/IML language. However, a principal of good software design is to encapsulate functionality and write self-contained functions that compute and return the results. What is the best way to return multiple statistics from a SAS/IML module? A convenient

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Advanced Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJuly 15, 2020 0

How to evaluate the multivariate normal log likelihood

The multivariate normal distribution is used frequently in multivariate statistics and machine learning. In many applications, you need to evaluate the log-likelihood function in order to compare how well different models fit the data. The log-likelihood for a vector x is the natural logarithm of the multivariate normal (MVN) density

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Programming Tips

James Gearheart

James GearheartJuly 14, 2020 0

Adjusting outliers with the 1.5 IQR rule

In my new book, End-to-End Data Science with SAS: A Hands-On Programming Guide, I use the 1.5 IQR rule to adjust multiple variables. This program utilizes a macro that loops through a list of variables to make the necessary adjustments and creates an output data set. One of the most

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