On discussion forums, many SAS programmers ask about the best way to generate dummy variables for categorical variables. Well-meaning responders offer all sorts of advice, including writing your own DATA step program, sometimes mixed with macro programming. This article shows that the simplest and easiest way to generate dummy variables
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Decision trees are a fundamental machine learning technique that every data scientist should know. Luckily, the construction and implementation of decision trees in SAS is straightforward and easy to produce. There are simply three sections to review for the development of decision trees: Data Tree development Model evaluation Data The
In the paper "Tips and Techniques for Using the Random-Number Generators in SAS" (Sarle and Wicklin, 2018), I discussed an example that uses the new STREAMREWIND subroutine in Base SAS 9.4M5. As its name implies, the STREAMREWIND subroutine rewinds a random number stream, essentially resetting the stream to the beginning.
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Analytics is playing an increasingly strategic role in the ongoing digital transformation of organizations today. However, to succeed and scale your digital transformation efforts, it is critical to enable analytics skills at all tiers of your organization. In a recent blog post covering 4 principles of analytics you cannot ignore,
I got a lot of feedback about my recent article about how to find roots of nonlinear functions by using the SOLVE function in PROC FCMP. A colleague asked how the FCMP procedure stores the functions. Specifically, why the OUTLIB= option on the PROC FCMP statement use a three-level syntax:
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SAS Viya is an open analytics platform accessible from interfaces or various coding languages. REST API is one of the widely used interfaces. Multiple resources exist on how to access SAS Visual Analytics reports using SAS Viya REST API. For example Programmatically listing data sources in SAS Visual Analytics by
Finding the root (or zero) of a nonlinear function is an important computational task. In the case of a one-variable function, you can use the SOLVE function in PROC FCMP to find roots of nonlinear functions in the DATA step. This article shows how to use the SOLVE function to
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What is automated prediction?
Automated prediction, in less than a minute, runs several analytic models (such as decision trees, gradient boosting, and logistic and linear regression) on a specific variable of your choice. Most of the remaining variables in your dataset are automatically analyzed as factors that might influence your specified variable. They are called...
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I recently showed how to use simulation to estimate the power of a statistical hypothesis test. The example (a two-sample t test for the difference of means) is a simple SAS/IML module that is very fast. Fast is good because often you want to perform a sequence of simulations over
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