Tag: Technical

Read sas7bdat files in R with GGASoftware Parso library

… using the new R package sas7bdat.parso. The software company GGASoftware has extended the work of myself and others on the sas7bdat R package by developing a Java library called Parso, which also reads sas7bdat files. They have worked out most of the remaining kinks. For example, the Parso library reads sas7bdat files with compressed […]

Individual vs. Group Incentive for Weight Loss

A new Annals of Internal Medicine article describes a study that compares two employer-sponsored financial incentive programs for promoting weight loss among obese employees. I first read about the article at the Pacific Standard. The study design is a randomized controlled prospective trial. The two programs are as follows: Program 1. Obese employees are given […]

Another Mystery: sas7bdat != sd2

I received an email from a very inconvenienced statistician a few weeks ago. The problem was an old data file with the extension .sd2. Apparently, this is an obsolete data storage format used by past versions of SAS. A quick glance at the file contents revealed that this sd2 formatted file is incompatible with the […]

More sas7bdat progress

The development version of the read.sas7bdat function (in the sas7bdat package) now reads field labels and formats. In addition, errors of the type “found <x> <type> subheaders where 1 expected” are now a thing of the past. These improvements are largely due to work by Clint Cummins. The function also works on some files generated […]

tty Connection + sas7bdat: useR! 2011 Presentation Slides

Experimenting with a tty Connection for R I presented twice at this years useR!. The first was a regular talk on the tty connection patch for R. The talk went smoothly, despite a live demonstration using the DLP-232PC data acquisition module (datasheet). The slides for this presentation are here: shotwell-tty-useR-2011.pdf The image above is a […]

Slides for Reproducible Research Talk at Interface 2011

I gave a talk at the Interface Symposium on reproducible research in practice. I went first in the session, so the slides have a bit more background and philosophy. It was a great session; one of Jon Claerbout’s colleagues spoke, Sergey Fomel, a founding author of Madagascar; Sorin Mitran from UNC Chapel Hill talked about […]

sas7bdat database reader update

An earlier post (1216) introduced a compatibility study (i.e. reverse engineering) of the sas7bdat database file format. The code and documentation for this are here: http://github.com/biostatmatt/sas7bdat. I’ve recently restructured the code as an R package, and added some functionality. Look for the sas7bdat package on the CRAN. Also, the read.sas7bdat code has been ported to […]