Once upon a time SAS released (into the wild) Enterprise Guide (EG), an all things to all people  tool, allowing SAS users to continue writing code or to start using a range of Wizards and Tasks to write code for them. When  EG came out people did not know what to do...

Enterprise guide for SAS coders. (Part 1 – Code glorious code) There is a silent war in the SAS world, 2 camps locked in a bitter rivalry. In the red corner we have Base SAS coders, who believe that writing in pure code is the way forward, in the Blue corner there are...

First and foremost you must realise that no model is perfect!   Next to getting stuck in ‘analysis paralysis’ in the exploring phase - the temptation to create a perfect model is the best way to suck up time with nothing to show for it.   What you want is a model...

After weeks or even months of data discovery, exploration, cleansing, determining potential variables to use as well undergoing variable transformations you are now in a position to create a model.   Your model will predict or explain: Numeric targets such as the...

All too often experts over complicate problems and express them in obscure language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_elitism As an expert in my field, I regularly use technical jargon because I need to be precise. There are circumstances when the difference...

One of the great things about SAS is that there is normally a few viable ways of doing anything that you may want to do, this blog will cover the ways in which you can add a sequential number to a SAS dataset. My recommended method is to use a Data Step. Very...

So you’ve gone  from the dizzying highs of the midnight idea that will illuminate all the gems hidden in your data, solve world hunger & bring peace to all - to the crashing lows where it turned out to be a dud. You’ve survived the roller coaster ride of exploring...

When a 6 year old is asked what they want to be when they grow up, their answer is normally a generic one – a vet, a policeman, a rugby player. How many people answered with Data Scientist? Chances are you didn’t even know what that was, most people still don’t. The...

Once you have data the next tricky bit is knowing what to do with it. While its tempting to jump into the hardcore analytics and play with all the new flashy software that’s around you first need to explore & summarise the data you have. Exploring your data...

Getting started with analytics can be overwhelming – the language off putting, the size of data involved immense, the complexity of the problem staggering.  However getting started is simply a matter of following these steps: Define the business purpose Define success...

How often do you find yourself building an EG project with the intent of changing certain filters on each run? Welcome to the world of SAS prompts – designed to take the guess work out of reminders. Prompt Manager (found in EG’s Query Builder) is designed to create...

Analytics it’s the in thing – what with social media exploding, big data and sexy statisticians (who would have thought!). But what is analytics? Is it the be all and end all it’s cracked up to be? (Pretty much yes – but I could be a little biased!) In a nutshell,...

As I have said in another blog, we have recently changed from WordPress to Webflow this gave me a chance to set up some things for our current blog content as well as planning for the future of our content. How did I do this I hear you ask, well easily is the answer...