Read the Preface for Siegel’s Book – Predictive Analytics

Here is the preface for Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

By Eric Siegel, with a foreword from Tom Davenport

(Wiley, February 2013)

 

To order the book:…

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When I was growing up, a big treat on a summer afternoon was to get a Dairy Queen ice cream cone dipped in chocolate. Dairy Queen advertised their treats as scrumpdillyicious, which they were to a seven year old!  If you are not aware, SAS ships some shared prompts that you can use with your stored process … and you guessed it … I think they are scrumpdillyicious!

Locating the Shared Prompts

SAS…

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By Steve Overton

 

On my current “big data” project, I’m connecting SAS to PostgreSQL using the ODBC access engine.  At first I was seeing pretty bad performance – specifically I wasn’t able to view the ~2.2…

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The first thing many customers want to do is make their SAS BI Dashboard to look more like "them". They want their organizational branding (their logo, colors, and corporate identity). If that task has fallen on your, here's some guidance about how to accomplish that task.

What the Heck is the Flex Theme Designer?

The SAS BI Dashboard is an Adobe…

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SAS Business Intelligence applications use global macro variables to store information about the environment as well as prompt values entered by a user. When developing a Stored Process it is often helpful to review the values of these macro variables. A simple %PUT statement, %PUT _GLOBAL_ ; , will write a listing of the values of all global macro variables to the log, but the formatting leaves a lot to be desired. This post describes a simple utility macro,…

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Steve Overton is working on his SAS Global Forum 2013 paper idea! I don't want to give away his secret - but he wants to show some ways to work with Big Data. First he has to load the big data into his demo system - here's some tricks he has learned.

Do you know some others? Share them!

SAS Administration: Process Data Faster in RDBMS by Buffering the Data in Memory

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Steve Overton posted this article:

 

When troubleshooting data performance problems, IO problems, or simple library connectivity, I use a simple snippet of code to push the data storage to the limits.  It is useful because it stresses the data storage component, whether it be a SAS dataset on local file storage or an external database like Oracle, and it provides useful performance metrics.  To make it even better, since this is a SAS Macro it can easily be…

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Steve Overton shares this tip for SAS Enterprise Guide users and administrators!

 

A nice feature of SAS Enterprise Guide is the “Files” folder.  This provides direct access to the file system where the workspace server is running.  You can take advantage of this by configuring a central location where users can store data, SAS…

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Perhaps you took my advise a few weeks back and took advantage of the amazing (trumps blare!) SAS Enterprise Guide ability to import MS Excel spreadsheets.  However, if your spreadsheet is a little different – then you may run into some issue when you go to import it.  For instance, look at this…

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When I was creating the Summary and Detailed reports for the SAS Global Forum paper, I was demonstrating how to link from the weekly chart to the detailed report about the week.  On my first try with my Week Filter based on the date value – it just would not work.  Eeek!  To fix the problem I made a new data item that was a character value.  This posts talks about my strategy.  [You can read our paper "…

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Here’s some usability tricks that I have learned with my SAS Stored Processes to make them more robust and harder to break.  Really the out-of-the box prompts provide a lot of functionality that really helps. That’s right – let’s build a better mousetrap!…

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Determining seasonality, deseasonlizing seasonal data, getting trend indices, getting seasonality indices have always been a boring nightmare for Analysts when it comes to analysing percentage increase in some parameter like sales, visits, frauds etc., negating the effects due to seasonality. All the above mentioned so called "NIGHTMARES"can be easily handled with the powerful but less used SAS procedure called PROC X11.



PROC X11 works as below,

It splits the actual data into… Continue