Suppose you have an old jalopy that’s perfectly reliable. Your jalopy gets you where you wanna go: no frills; no drama. Do you trade your old wheels in for a racecar that accelerates like crazy and corners like it’s on rails? Or stick with what’s old…
Category: SAS
Dummy coding in SAS
Here is a macro to generate binary features (also called dummy coding) from a nominal variable (also called a categorical variable, such as eye color). The automation saves time and avoids mistakes when there are many possible values to a category or …
NOTE: DS2, Learn Something New!
There’s never a bad time to learn something new. How about DS2?
In May of last year, upon returning home from SAS Global Forum, I wrote about DS2, a new alternative to DATA step. Generally available in V9.4, PROC DS2 is currently available in SAS…
Are great data scientists really appreciated?
I could not agree more with Thomas C. Redman’s post “What Separates a Good Data Scientist from a Great One” (Harvard Business Review, January 28, 2013, ). I would like to suggest that sometimes it is not just down to the traits of the person doi…
If Netflix had used my viewing history to create its new show
Netflix has made a big splash in the news with its use of big data. By analyzing millions of data points about the viewing habits of its customers, the movie delivery giant used the insight it gained to devise the “perfect show”. One of the defining characteristics of the show, […]
LearningR!
I spent almost all of my blogging time last month to follow an online course in Coursera, Computing for Data Analysis (with R) by Dr. Roger Peng of Johns Hopkins, Biostatistics Department. I already checked out bunch of Coursera courses just to take a look at what else MOOC look like, this R course was […]
Some differences of the data frames between R and Pandas
Pandas is an emerging open source framework on Python and a substitute to R. Both apply a data structure called DataFrame. Although their data frames look quite similar, there are some cautions for a R programmer who like to play Pandas. A …
A SAS graph for the Chinese New Year
I like to think that I have a graph for all occasions – Chinese New Year is no exception! … This year, the Chinese New Year is on Feb 10, 2013. The date varies from year to year, because it’s based on the lunar (moon) cycles. I thought it would […..