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Programming Tips

Strengthen your programming skills with tips and techniques from the experts

Programming Tips

Lora D. DelwicheFebruary 18, 2020 0

Test your SAS skills with the newest edition of Exercises and Projects for The Little SAS Book

In case you missed the news, there is a new edition of The Little SAS Book! Last fall, we completed the sixth edition of our book, and even though it is actually a few pages shorter than the fifth edition, we managed to add many more topics to the book.

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Programming Tips

Suzanne MorgenFebruary 14, 2020 0

Learn to Love SAS LIKE

In honor of Valentine’s day, we thought it would be fitting to present an excerpt from a paper about the LIKE operator because when you like something a lot, it may lead to love! If you want more, you can read the full paper “Like, Learn to Love SAS® Like”

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonFebruary 13, 2020 0

Giving your maps more visual impact!

There are many ways to add more "visual impact" to your maps. Some techniques grab the users' attention, but often don't add anything useful to the message the map is trying to convey (such as 3D tricks, or flashy/gratuitous images and infographics). I encourage you to design maps that have

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Energy & Utilities

Analytics | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinFebruary 12, 2020 0

The Johnson system: Which distribution should you choose to model data?

The Johnson system (Johnson, 1949) contains a family of four distributions: the normal distribution, the lognormal distribution, the SB distribution, and the SU distribution. Previous articles explain why the Johnson system is useful and show how to use PROC UNIVARIATE in SAS to estimate parameters for the Johnson SB distribution

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinFebruary 10, 2020 0

Find the fractional part of a number

You can represent every number as a nearby integer plus a decimal. For example, 1.3 = 1 + 0.3. The integer is called the integer part of x, whereas the decimal is called the fractional part of x (or sometimes the decimal part of x). This representation is not unique.

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Programming Tips

Ron CodyFebruary 5, 2020 0

Finding Possible Data Errors Using the %Auto_Outliers Macro

One of the first and most important steps in analyzing data, whether for descriptive or inferential statistical tasks, is to check for possible errors in your data. In my book, Cody's Data Cleaning Techniques Using SAS, Third Edition, I describe a macro called %Auto_Outliers. This macro allows you to search

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinFebruary 3, 2020 0

What sample size do you need for a binomial test of proportions?

Recently someone on social media asked, "how can I compute the required sample size for a binomial test?" I assume from the question that the researcher was designing an experiment to test the proportions between two groups, such as a control group and a treatment/intervention group. They wanted to know

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonJanuary 31, 2020 0

Magnetic north moved 50 miles last year (let's map it!)

I've read several articles that mentioned the north magnetic pole has been moving more in the past few decades, than in the previous few hundred years. And as a Map Guy, I knew I just had to plot this data on a map, and see it for myself! I provide

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Leonid BatkhanJanuary 27, 2020 0

Shifting a date by a given number of workdays

This blog post demonstrates process and SAS coding techniques to shift dates by a given number of workdays accounting for weekends and holidays.

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Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJanuary 27, 2020 0

The Johnson SU distribution

The Johnson system (Johnson, 1949) contains a family of four distributions: the normal distribution, the lognormal distribution, the SB distribution (which models bounded distributions), and the SU distribution (which models unbounded distributions). Note that 'B' stands for 'bounded' and 'U' stands for 'unbounded.' A previous article explains the purpose of

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Data for Good | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonJanuary 24, 2020 0

Creating a map to track the coronavirus

The coronavirus has been a big item in the news lately - it's a pneumonia-like illness that has killed several people. It's thought to have started in China, and has spread to several other countries (including at least one case in the U.S.). The World Health Organization says the coronavirus

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Data for Good | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonJanuary 23, 2020 0

How to prepare (your graphs) for flu season

The flu season has started here in the U.S., and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data it has caused 214 deaths in the first week of 2020. Is this number higher, or lower, than usual? When does the flu season start, and how long does

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Programming Tips

Lora D. DelwicheJanuary 21, 2020 0

Expand Your SAS Knowledge by Learning PROC SQL

One great thing about being a SAS programmer is that you never run out of new things to learn. SAS often gives us a variety of methods to produce the same result. One good example of this is the DATA step and PROC SQL, both of which manipulate data. The

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Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJanuary 20, 2020 0

The Johnson SB distribution

From the early days of probability and statistics, researchers have tried to organize and categorize parametric probability distributions. For example, Pearson (1895, 1901, and 1916) developed a system of seven distributions, which was later called the Pearson system. The main idea behind a "system" of distributions is that for each

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonJanuary 15, 2020 0

Where's the best place to retire, in the U.S.?

As I get older, a few of my buddies are starting to retire. And this makes me think about my own retirement (not that I'm anywhere near old enough to retire, mind you!) Therefore when I saw a list of the "Best & Worst Cities for Retiring" it caught my

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Suzanne MorgenJanuary 13, 2020 0

Foresight is 2020! New books to take your skills to the next level

Are you ready to get a jump start on the new year? If you’ve been wanting to brush up your SAS skills or learn something new, there’s no time like a new decade to start! SAS Press is releasing several new books in the upcoming months to help you stay

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Programming Tips

Amber ElamJanuary 10, 2020 0

Why does my SAS date have the wrong century?

2020 is here and systems that use 2-digit years in date values are getting confused. Do we mean 1920 or 2020? In SAS, the YEARCUTOFF= option lets you decide.

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Programming Tips

Ron CodyJanuary 8, 2020 0

Adventures of a SAS detective and the fantastic FIND function

Did I trick you into seeing what this blog is about with its mysterious title? I am going to talk about how to use the FIND function to search text values. The FIND function searches for substrings in character values. For example, you might want to extract all email addresses

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonJanuary 7, 2020 0

Are winters colder in North Carolina, or Canada?

If someone proposes a bet to you, then you should be suspicious that they already know they're going to win. And one frequent topic of such bets is the weather... What if I bet you there's a city in Canada with a warmer average January temperature than Raleigh, NC? You

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Data Visualization | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJanuary 6, 2020 0

Top posts from The DO Loop in 2019

Last year, I wrote more than 100 posts for The DO Loop blog. The most popular articles were about SAS programming tips for data analysis, statistical analysis, and data visualization. Here are the most popular articles from 2019 in each category. SAS programming tips Create training, testing, and validation data

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonDecember 23, 2019 0

What restaurant is always open on holidays? - Waffle House!

Do you find yourself on the road during the holidays, and looking for a place to eat that's still open? Or perhaps you're like me - I don't cook at home, and I'm not really into visiting family for the holidays and eating with them. Well then, you probably know

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Data Management | Programming Tips

Yinliang WuDecember 20, 2019 0

How to filter variables by percentage of missing values or duplicate values in SAS

This article discusses how to use SAS to filter variables in a dataset based on the percentage of missing values or duplicate values. The missing value statistics can be implemented by either DATA step programming on your own or reusing the existing powerful PROC FREQ.

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonDecember 19, 2019 0

Cracking the code, of the Star Wars timeline!

The Rise of Skywalker, the final movie in the third set of the three Star Wars trilogies, will finally be released tomorrow (December 20, 2019). That's 9 movies, in about 42 years. And, if the first movies aren't still fresh in your mind (or perhaps you weren't even born when

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Sports & Entertainment

Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Sian RobertsDecember 17, 2019 0

How many people does it take to publish a book?

The next time you pick up a book, you might want to pause and think about the work that has gone into producing it – and not just from the authors.

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonDecember 12, 2019 0

What areas in NC have growing/shrinking population?

I can tell that my area (Wake county, NC) has a growing population, because the traffic keeps getting worse and worse. But it's a little difficult to quantitatively gauge growth by looking at traffic congestion. Therefore let's have a look at a more direct measurement - the actual population data!

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics | Machine Learning | Programming Tips

Nelson Grajales

Nelson GrajalesDecember 11, 2019 0

Machine Learning with SASPy: Exploring and Preparing your data - Part 3

Parts 1 and 2 of this blog post discussed exploring and preparing your data using SASPy. To recap, Part 1 discussed how to explore data using the SASPy interface with Python. Part 2 continued with an explanation of how to prepare your data to use it with a machine-learning model.

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Analytics | Learn SAS | Machine Learning | Programming Tips

Nelson Grajales

Nelson GrajalesDecember 11, 2019 0

Adding SAS® procedures to the SASPy interface to Python

Bringing the power of SAS to your Python scripts can be a game changer. An easy way to do that is by using SASPy, a Python interface to SAS allowing Python developers to use SAS® procedures within Python. However, not all SAS procedures are included in the SASPy library. So,

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinDecember 11, 2019 0

Swap elements in binary matrices

Binary matrices are used for many purposes. I have previously written about how to use binary matrices to visualize missing values in a data matrix. They are also used to indicate the co-occurrence of two events. In ecology, binary matrices are used to indicate which species of an animal are

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonDecember 10, 2019 0

Mapping Antarctica, with a tile-based map

As we're getting into December, and the weather is getting colder, I thought it would be cool to plot some Antarctica data. You might remember I did this about 1.5 years ago, using good-old Proc Gmap, a special projection, and lots of tricky annotation. Well, this time let's use the

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