Tag: tips and tricks

Syntactic sugar – 6 SAS essentials

The 25 boys I teach on Sundays loved these cupcakes I baked for them for Easter… the sugared peeps had them completely satisfied. I love my tea or coffee laced with sugar. I think you‘d all agree that it is always more pleasant to meet a nice custo…

Jedi SAS Tricks: These aren’t the droids… Episode 1

How the power of the Force makes ridding yourself of problematic characters so much easier! I recently was invited to become an alternate instructor for Ron Cody’s SAS Business Knowledge Series class, “SAS Functions by Example”, and had the privilege…

Jedi SAS Tricks: Building a Name Suffix variable list

If you’ve taken one of my SAS classes you may recall “Mark’s 3 rules of programming”, the first of which is “Lazy programmers are GOOD programmers.”  One of the things I love about best about SAS programming is the plethora of functions an…

Top 5 SAS programming best practices

I’m sure you will all agree that a programmer’s favorite task is to maximize efficiency thus enhancing performance. Dear reader, in this blog post I’ll share my best programming practices so that you can benefit from what I typically show my…

The Punchline: MANOVA or a Mixed Model?

So, if you were reading last week, we talked about how to structure your data for a mixed models repeated measures analysis. And as my friend Rick pointed out, there’s more than one way to go about restructuring your data (if you ask real nice, …

Discrimanant Analysis, Priors, and Fairy-Selection

A student in my multivariate class last month asked a question about prior probability specifications in discriminant function analysis:
What if I don’t know what the probabilities are in my population? Is it best to just use the default in PROC D…

Weekday Morning Quick-trick: How to Score from PROC VARCLUS

Have you used multivariate procedures in SAS and wanted to save out scores? Some procedures, such as FACTOR, CANDISC, CANCORR, PRINCOMP, and others have an OUT= option to save scores to the input data set. However, to score a new data set, or to p…