I’m taking off for two weeks on a working vacation defined as I will be working while the rest of the family is on vacation. I found it interesting that the list of what I NEEDED to do in getting ready was Go to the Apple store and pick up a 500 GB hard drive….
I thought it would be really interesting today to get back to looking at SAS Enterprise Miner, especially the text mining. I thought it would be cool to take another look at Statistica. I also thought it would be cool to finish a blog post I started on power analysis for mixed models. And I…
I looked on my calendar and there was a reminder that a month from now I will be in Nova Scotia. I try to get in my travel to anywhere north of Santa Barbara between May and October due to a near-fatal allergy to cold weather. I’m looking forward to this trip, for a few…
No, this is not a post about politics or life-hacking, although the same title could apply in either case. I am talking about statistical power. People often ask me what the power of a test is, but the problem is that they are asking the wrong question. Power is not a single number. I understand…
After over a quarter of a century of experience working as a statistical consultant in a wide array of settings, it’s safe to say that a large proportion of the statistics presentations cover topics I have been over before. Still, even if it is a technique I’ve used many times, I almost always come across…
There must be some hallucinogenic drug given off by spring flowers, because it is the one time in the year when I am struck by the irrational thought, “Maybe I should clean my office.” Like any other spring cleaning undertaking, random things are uncovered that make me think, “Huh. I wonder what that was for.”…
Continuing to learn Advanced SAS from the Propensity Score Matching with Calipers macro from Feng, Yu & Xu , we take our data set we created by doing a principal components analysis on the cases (experimental) group, using the coefficients from that analysis to score every record in our control group, concatenating the cases and controls,…
I was using a macro this week written by Feng, Yu & Xu and there were so many less-used and advanced techniques in it I thought it would be a great example to use for teaching SAS. ** ** Nifty thing one computing the caliper width ***** ; Like with other propensity score macros, it…
Recently, I had the need to write the exact same programs twice, once using SAS and once using SPSS syntax. Even though these aren’t the same language, having done it once made it much easier to do it the second time. Let’s start with quintile matching. I’ve been rambling on about propensity scores lately and…
I wrote Part 1 a couple of years ago, so I guess I’m due for a part 2. In this case, I started with a data set in SAS but because it was going to be used by a group who had some SAS users and some SPSS users, they wanted to have the code…