Strengthen your programming skills with tips and techniques from the experts
The SAS INFILE statement can read multiple text files in a single DATA step. Use file name wildcards (like * and ?) and a special FILENAME= option to keep track of which records come from which files.
I attended the Scottish Highland Games this past weekend ... nearby in Scotland County, North Carolina! They put on a great event, with kilt-wearing Scotsmen throwing things, bands playing bagpipes, kids dancing, and clans sharing their family history. And to get into the mood for this event, I decided to
The STYLEATTRS statement in PROC SGPLOT enables you to override colors, markers, line patterns, fill patterns, and axis break patterns in ODS styles, without requiring you to change the ODS style template.
This article compares several ways to find the elements that are common to multiple sets. I test which method is the fastest in the SAS/IML language. However, all algorithms are intrinsically fast, which raises an important question: when is it worth the time and effort to optimize an algorithm? The
You can use SG annotation to display graphs inside of other graphs.
It is sometimes necessary for researchers to simulate data with thousands of variables. It is easy to simulate thousands of uncorrelated variables, but more difficult to simulate thousands of correlated variables. For that, you can generate a correlation matrix that has special properties, such as a Toeplitz matrix or a
Over the years, the US has drilled for crude oil in several locations, such as Pennsylvania, Texas, Alaska, and the Gulf of Mexico. A few years ago, as the US started drilling more in North Dakota, there were forecasts that we would surpass Saudi Arabia in crude oil production. And recently,
I often get asked for programming tips. Here, I share three of my favorite tips for beginners. Tip #1: COUNTC and CATS Functions Together The CATS function concatenates all of its arguments after it strips leading and trailing blanks. The COUNTC function counts characters. Together, they can let you operate
Programmers on a SAS discussion forum recently asked about the chi-square test for proportions as implemented in PROC FREQ in SAS. One person asked the basic question, "how do I test the null hypothesis that the observed proportions are equal to a set of known proportions?" Another person said that
A radial basis function is a scalar function that depends on the distance to some point, called the center point, c. One popular radial basis function is the Gaussian kernel φ(x; c) = exp(-||x – c||2 / (2 σ2)), which uses the squared distance from a vector x to the
Here in North Carolina, a hurricane recently moved very slowly across our state, causing major flooding, and even closing miles of interstate highways for longer than a week. There is data available online for gauges along the river (or gages, as they call them), but I doubt many people know
Last week I compared the overhand shuffle to the riffle shuffle. I used random operations to simulate both kinds of shuffles and then compared how well they mix cards. The article caused one my colleague and fellow blogger, Rob Pratt, to ask if I was familiar with a bit of
Do you want to insert blank rows into your TABULATE procedure tables? Here's a SAS sample and two other methods that will get the job done.
How can you use analytics to design better biopsies and improve outcomes? This high school student has some ideas, and she presented them at Analytics Experience 2018.
"We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin' rain, and big ol' fat rain, rain that flew in sideways, and sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath." Was that a quote from the Forrest Gump movie, or something said regarding Hurricane Florence? Could be either one! Hurricane Florence recently came through
SAS Press author Kirk Paul Lafler's favorite tips using PROC SQL.
데이터 사이언티스트들은 작업 시간의 대부분을 데이터 준비와 피처(feature) 엔지니어링에 할애합니다. 지난 블로그를 통해 데이터 준비 작업에 유용한 프로그래밍 팁을 소개해드렸는데요. 오늘은 인공지능(AI) 기반 엔터프라이즈 분석 플랫폼 ‘SAS 바이야(SAS Viya)’의 기본 템플릿 중 ‘자동화된 피처 엔지니어링 템플릿’을 활용해 손쉽게 예측 모델을 생성하는 방법을 살펴보고자 합니다. 피처는 입력과 변수(독립 변수, 설명 변수)를 의미합니다. 그리고 피처 엔지니어링은 예측
To succeed in any data-focused hackathon, you need a robust set of tools and skills – as well as a can-do attitude. Here's what you can expect from any hackathon: Messy data. It might come from a variety of sources, and won't necessarily be organized for analytics or reporting. That's
The SAS/IML language and the MATLAB language are similar. Both provide a natural syntax for performing high-level computations on vectors and matrices, including basic linear algebra subroutines. Sometimes a SAS programmer will convert an algorithm from MATLAB into SAS/IML. Because the languages are not identical, I am sometimes asked, "what
You can use Unicode to display special characters in SAS output including tables and graphs. With graphs that analytical procedures produce, you might need additional steps.
Here in North Carolina (NC), we're pretty much resigned to the fact that many of the hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean are going to visit us. NC sticks out farther into the ocean than most of our neighboring states, and that just makes a tempting target for the hurricanes. But
Given a rectangular grid with unit spacing, what is the expected distance between two random vertices, where distance is measured in the L1 metric? (Here "random" means "uniformly at random.") I recently needed this answer for some small grids, such as the one to the right, which is a 7 x 6
I usually create very technical graphs, that just focus on conveying the information in a concise and straightforward manner (no wasted colors, and nothing to distract you from the data). But sometimes, depending on your audience and the purpose of the graph, you might need to create a graph that
Find out about the new edition of Ron Cody's latest best selling book.
Continued fractions show up in surprising places. They are used in the numerical approximations of certain functions, including the evaluation of the normal cumulative distribution function (normal CDF) for large values of x (El-bolkiny, 1995, p. 75-77) and in approximating the Lambert W function, which has applications in the modeling
Many of the most beautiful areas in the US are owned by the government, to preserve them and allow access for everyone to enjoy them. And most US schools are traditionally closed during the summer, which provides families a great opportunity to go visit state and federal lands (parks, forests,
In the SAS/IML language, you can only concatenate vectors that have conforming dimensions. For example, to horizontally concatenate two vectors X and Y, the symbols X and Y must have the same number of rows. If not, the statement Z = X || Y will produce an error: ERROR: Matrices
If you're good at games like Wheel of Fortune, Scrabble, or Words with Friends, you've probably figured out that certain letters appear more often than others. But do you have a cool way to figure out which letters appear most & least frequently? How about using a computer to plot
Using relative file paths in your SAS programs? Use the new DLGCDIR function to manage your SAS working directory -- even in SAS Enterprise Guide or SAS Studio -- to ensure your programs are working the way they ought to.
This blog post highlights more SAS Global Forum papers chosen by SAS Press authors.
