{"id":1753,"date":"2011-10-27T02:04:28","date_gmt":"2011-10-27T07:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/?p=1753"},"modified":"2011-11-03T14:57:40","modified_gmt":"2011-11-03T19:57:40","slug":"random-sas-tips-from-colorado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/random-sas-tips-from-colorado\/","title":{"rendered":"Random SAS tips from Colorado"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Snow\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Two things, first of all.<\/p>\n

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  1. Those folks in Colorado are unbelievable studs to come out in inches of snow and more falling to a full house at the Denver & northern Colorado \/ Wyoming SAS users group meeting.<\/li>\n
  2. I’ll bet the people in North Dakota are laughing their asses off right now thinking, “If that little bit of snow bothers her, wait until she comes up here next month.” I can hardly wait.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    As with any time I go to a user group meeting, I learned some things and was reminded of other things I had forgotten. In random order of coolness<\/p>\n

    Robert Gately<\/strong> –\u00a0 showed some interesting uses of logistic regression, but in the process brought up some little SAS tricks I had not thought of in a long time. For example:<\/p>\n

    Use of a : as a wild card character for variables such as<\/p>\n

    ARRAY survey {*}\u00a0 Q:\u00a0 ;<\/p>\n

    Will create an array with all of the variables starting with Q .<\/p>\n

    Haping Luo wrote a whole paper on the use of the colon in SAS.<\/a> And I read it, which according to my darling daughters, is nerd squared.<\/p>\n

    Steve Anderson<\/strong> had an interesting use for ridge regression to handle multicollinearity. Along with that, he had a formula that he used to get the best estimate of the k factor. He showed an application of it and it seemed to work pretty well. Unfortunately, I wasn’t fast enough to write it down but he promised to send me his paper.<\/p>\n

    Denise Poll <\/strong>from SAS discussed SAS options – did you know that there are around 1,500 SAS options? Pretty amazing, huh?\u00a0 Oddly, she did not discuss any options I hadn’t heard of before in her paper (she obviously only had time to discuss a limited number). However, she did mention a function I had never heard of – the getoption function ,<\/a> which will tell you a lot of information about any option you specify, including the default setting, current setting and even help rat out who changed it.<\/p>\n

    Despite aspersions cast by my enemies, the SAS VERBOSE option <\/a>was not named after me, although I have used it from time to time. It is actually a useful diagnostic tool sometimes to see the settings of your SAS system options.<\/p>\n

    I also rambled on some about categorical data analysis but I didn’t learn anything from that because I already knew it (you thought I just made this shit up, didn’t you? Au contraire). On the other hand, I did learn something from a question someone asked about computing a kappa for more than two raters. I told her I did not know that PROC FREQ did it but I was sure at a minimum there was a macro out there. When I got back to somewhere with Internet access, it took me five seconds to find out that yes, there is such a macro by Bin Chen et al from Westat<\/a> . You can also do it with JMP 9, according to their documentation. Look up categorical kappa.<\/p>\n

    And that was just in the morning.<\/p>\n

    There were some really good speakers in the afternoon. I would like to write about the cool stuff about ODS, Report (okay, I don’t really use report but it is cool if you like that sort of thing) and LSMestimate.<\/p>\n

    I’d also like to talk about the wrong direction I think SAS is taking in neglecting the Mac market and the complete missed market opportunity with SAS on demand. However, it will have to wait because I just got home, it’s midnight and there is a bubble bath and a glass of wine calling my name.\u00a0 Also, the recording of The Daily Show is playing, with Pat Robertson talking about having sex with ducks (I’m not kidding). If I was a more timid soul, I might be thrown off balance by talking alcoholic beverages and bath water. That doesn’t scare me. Robertson, though, is a little creepy.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

                      Two things, first of all. Those folks in Colorado are unbelievable studs to come out in inches of snow and more falling to a full house at the Denver & northern Colorado \/ Wyoming SAS users group meeting. I’ll bet the people in North Dakota are…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1753"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1785,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1753\/revisions\/1785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}