My SAS Global Forum 2012 Timeline

Thursday, 26 April, 2012

⨳ 14 minute read ⨳ 3283 words ⨳ conference ⨳ sas ⨳

Monday, April 23 (7 Sessions)

Technology Connection and Keynote Presentation

Presenters from SAS R&D offer a look at what’s new and techniques to enhance your current use of SAS. In addition to demos, SAS will review the results of this year’s SASware Ballot and present the 2012 User Feedback Award, SAS’ most prestigious technical award.

Joe Theismann, entrepreneur and former quarterback for the Washington Redskins, will talk about a Game Plan for Success.

What to Do with a Regular Expression

As many know, SAS has provided support for regular expressions for some time now. There are numerous papers that expose the basic concepts as well as some more advanced implementations of regular expressions. The intent of this paper is to narrow the gap between the very beginning and the advanced. In the past you might have solved a programming problem with a combination of SUBSTR/SCAN and other functions. Now a regular expression may be used to greatly reduce the amount of code needed to accomplish the same task. Think of this paper as a recipe or guide book that can be referenced for some real-life examples that will hopefully get you thinking about ways to create your own regular expressions.

Advanced XML Processing with SAS 9.3

XML has expanded far beyond the scope originally envisioned by its creators, and this has resulted in the addition of companion standards such as Namespaces in XML and XML Schema. This paper describes how SAS has advanced our XML technology in SAS 9.3 to more fully support these standards. It also examines some of the challenges you might encounter when processing complex XML and describes some best practices to help overcome the challenges.

Go Beyond the Wizard with Data-Driven Programming

Programming techniques that take advantage of Data-Driven Programming will be demonstrated for Novice and Intermediate Users of Base SAS. Most users already take advantage of Data-Driven Programming with wizards. Wizards harvest information through an interface and then write and execute programs based on those parameters. As programmers¶ skills evolve, they may want to edit the product of a wizard in order to confront a variety of problems that a wizard could not anticipate. Going a step further, programmers can author their own wizards that make their own work easier. The workshop will include demonstrations in working with built-in SAS wizards, developing simple Data-Driven Programs, and the use of parameter-gathering techniques using Enhanced Editor, simple macro language, and ODS.

02:45 PM - 02:55 PM Log Checks Made Easy

It is Good Programming Practice (GPP) if a programmer checks SAS log for errors, warnings, and all other objectionable SAS NOTE. In order to successfully create tables, listings, and figures, the programmer must ensure that code is correct, and the accuracy of the code, assuming that the program logic is correct, solely depends on SAS log. Using SAS macro language and Base SAS, this paper will introduce a macro that will enable a programmer or statistician to check all SAS logs in a folder and tabulate the log issues by the name of the SAS log file using PROC REPORT.

03:00 PM - 03:10 PM It’s Now Your Project—Clean It Up and Make It Shine

Inherited projects may not be well designed. Though a new project owner may not have time to upgrade substandard code immediately, most inherited projects offer plenty of room for improvement. Developing department or company standards and best practices, and then applying these standards and best practices can result in code that is easy to understand, easy to maintain, and easy to transition. The examples in this paper are meant to promote improvements in productivity, consistency, and clarity.

04:00 PM - 04:20 PM A Simple Way to Program Power Calculations

We propose a simulation of large sets of statistical power calculations and the selection of those calculations with appropriate power from a long list of study designs. Typical commercial programs complete all but one parameter and solve for the remaining parameter. We avoid solving equations and, thereby, obtain power for atypical designs. For simplicity, we compute the power for the test, comparing two proportions without assuming either an approximate normality or a common variance. We also extend the log-rank test power calculation to account for various patterns of on-study censoring, study duration, and patient recruitment periods. We generate a new approximation for the censoring adjustment. In so doing, we set out an easy way for others to modify our program for other related power calculations

04:30 PM - 04:50 PM Quick and Dirty Microsoft Excel Workbooks without Dynamic Data Exchange or the SAS Output Delivery System

Tuesday, April 24 (10 Sessions)

08:45 AM - 08:55 AM Inventory Your Files Using SAS

Whether you are attempting to figure out what you have when preparing for a migration or you just want to find out which files or directories are taking up all of your space, SAS is a great tool to inventory and report on the files on your desktop or server. This paper intends to present SAS code to inventory and report on the location you want to inventory.

09:30 AM - 09:50 AM Simple Version Control of SAS Programs and SAS Data Sets

SAS data sets and programs that reside on a local network are most often stored using a simple file system with no version control, no audit trail of changes, and none of the benefits. In this presentation, we show you how to capitalize on the capabilities of Subversion and other simple, straightforward conventions to provide version control and an audit trail for SAS data sets, standard macro libraries, and programs without changing the SAS environment. Extending the interaction with Subversion using a standard SAS macro is also explored.

10:00 AM - 10:20 AM Analyzing Sentiments in Tweets about Wal-Mart’s Gender Discrimination Lawsuit Verdict Using SAS Text Miner

Social Media has gained considerable attention as a valuable source to monitor customers and public reactions following corporate events. Especially the Tweets posted on Twitter are often used to spot trends, moods, and sentiments of customers and public. Given the huge volume of tweets that gets posted every day, it is extremely difficult for firms to spot current trends related to the public’s expressed sentiments about activities of the firm in the tweets. This paper demonstrates the application of a SAS macro (%GetTweet) to collect and summarize tweets and then an application of sentiment analysis on the fetched tweets using SAS Text Miner using directed search and summarization of specific text items.

10:30 AM - 10:50 AM Mix and Match: Diversity in Displaying Data

A programmer is often asked to “run some frequencies” or “put together a quick report” in order to share results with a group. Just as every scientist has a preferred output style (graph, table, figure, list, etc.) every programmer has a preferred way of getting there. The results of posing this question to five colleagues produced a variety of approaches including the use of PROC MEANS, PROC TABULATE, PROC FREQ, and PROC BOXPLOT as well as visualization techniques in JMP.

11:30 AM - 11:40 AM Splitting Data Sets on Unique Values: a Macro That Does It All

Sometimes it is necessary to split a data set into multiple data sets, depending on the unique values of a variable. After this task was requested several times at the Belastingdienst in the Netherlands, a macro was developed that could split every data set based on a variable. The results are a data set for every unique value of that variable. And, all it took was two DATA steps!

11:45 AM - 11:55 AM Techniques for Generating Dynamic Code from SAS DICTIONARY Data

Integrating the information from SAS DICTIONARY tables into programming helps create dynamic and efficient scripts to manage data sets. The purpose of this paper is to provide such techniques for generating dynamic code from SAS DICTIONARY tables. The author uses three macros to demonstrate how DICTIONARY tables-driven code is dynamically constructed via three approaches: SQL select into macro-variable method, call execute method, and generate-and-include an external file method. These macros manage all data sets at the library level: capitalize all character data, dump all data into an excel file, and query all character data with certain length. Using the basic techniques discussed in the paper, SAS programmers can develop their own dynamic scripts to accomplish other tasks.

01:30 PM - 01:50 PM Yes! SAS ExcelXP WILL NOT Create a Microsoft Excel Graph, but SAS Users Can Command Microsoft Excel to Automatically Create Graphs from SAS ExcelXP

The SAS ODS Tagset ExcelXP creates *.xml output, and *.xml output cannot contain graphs. So how can SAS programmers get graphs into your Excel workbooks? One way is to build them in Excel yourself. This paper shows you how to create data using SAS, and then command Microsoft Excel to read the data, create a graph or fully reformat a worksheet, without putting an Excel macro into the output Excel Workbook. And the program will do it all while you watch, including for multiple sheets in a workbook. The SAS code, and Excel code, shown is a fully integrated system to create and format macro-free Excel workbooks, using SAS 9 (SAS 8 if Internet downloads are available) and Excel 97 and above.

02:30 PM - 02:40 PM A Simple Way of Importing from a REST Web Service into SAS in Three Lines of Code

Think old programmers can’t learn new tricks? In this paper, I show two neat tricks that combine into something really clever. (1) Our first neat trick is that instead of a path to a file on disk, the filename statement can also accept a URL (via the URL Access Method). (2) Second, the SAS XML Libname Engine (SXLE) can read in a static XML document from a filename statement and turn it into a table. Combining these two, you can have SAS download a dynamically generated XML document, probably produced by a REST web service (which can be built in Java or PHP or .NET; it doesn’t matter), and you can do it all in three lines of code.

03:30 PM - 04:20 PM Visualizing Data Techniques, Including Autocharting and Big Data

Visualizing data of varying sizes can be challenging. This paper discusses the issues concerning visualizing data and provides suggestions on how to address these issues. The paper assists users who don’t know which visualization to use for their data.

04:30 PM - 05:20 PM Exploratory Factor Analysis with the World Values Survey

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) investigates the possible underlying factor structure (dimensions) of a set of interrelated variables without imposing a preconceived structure on the outcome (Child, 1990). The World Values Survey (WVS) measures changes in what people want out of life and what they believe. WVS helps a worldwide network of social scientists study changing values and their impact on social and political life. This presentation will explore dimensions of selected WVS items using exploratory factor analysis techniques with SAS PROC FACTOR. EFA guidelines and SAS code will be illustrated as well as a discussion of results.

Wednesday, April 25 (6 Sessions)

08:45 AM - 08:55 AM Using SAS to Get a Date: Integrating Google Calendar’s API with SAS

Google offers a powerful API that allows the more analytically and visually powerful SAS to interact with and manipulate calendar data. By combining the ease of Google calendaring with the power of SAS, businesses can operate more efficiently, increase customer satisfaction, and analyze their calendar data in nearly limitless ways. This paper illustrates how SAS can be used to create, modify, and directly interact with Google Calendar data via API calls. Using these calls, it is possible to retrieve available calendars; import all calendar data such as date, time, location, etc.; as well as add, delete, and modify preexisting calendars and their entries. This data can then be analyzed in any number of ways available through the power of SAS.

09:00 AM - 09:10 AM Batch Production of Driving Distances and Times Using SAS and Web Map APIs

This is a new methodology of using SAS URL access method and Web APIs to run queries on an interactive Web site. This method will capture driving distances and times from a Web map based on points marked by postal codes.

09:15 AM - 09:25 AM Multidimensional Scaling on ZIP Codes

Many marketing or customer relationship management activities require an efficient solution to manage a number of ZIP codes. In SAS, the ZIPCITYDISTANCE function calculates the geographic distances between any ZIP codes. And the MDS procedure translates the distance matrix of the ZIP codes into relational numeric values. This paper describes a simple solution that separates ZIP codes into limited levels based on the multidimensional scaling and clustering methods. With SAS¶s built-in ZIP code and map data sets, two illustrations on Texas and Orlando, FL, are introduced to show how to reduce a number of ZIP codes to manageable regions.

10:00 AM - 10:20 AM Selecting Unrestricted and Simple Random With Replacement Samples Using Base SAS and PROC SURVEYSELECT

This paper reviews techniques for selecting unrestricted and simple random without replacement samples using data step code and procedures such as PROC SORT and RANK. Random sampling basics are given that discusses the UNIFORM random number function and special SAS functions INT, CEIL,and FLOOR. Data step code for selecting Bernoulli samples and two different approaches to selecting a simple random sample without replacement are presented and discussed. Simpler ways to select simple random samples using PROC SORT and PROC RANK are illustrated. An alternative to selecting a random sample in the data step is to use PROC SURVEYSELECT in SAS/STAT. The syntax for the SURVEYSELECT procedure is given and discussed.References to published papers on how to use SAS to select random samples are given.

10:30 AM - 10:50 AM Simplifying the Analysis of Complex Survey Data Using the SAS Survey Analysis Procedures

Large surveys have design features like stratification, clustering, and unequal probability of selection. The calculation of weights involves nonresponse adjustments and raking. The analysis includes descriptive statistics such as frequencies, means, and their standard errors. Standard statistical software modules such as PROC FREQ and PROC MEANS underestimate variance as they assume that the data is from a simple random sample. The survey procedures such as SURVEYMEANS and SURVEYFREQ that have been added to SAS/STAT software can compute variances that accurately reflect complex sample design and estimation procedures. This paper compares the complexity of the variance estimation code used in earlier projects with the simplicity of the code that is possible using the survey analysis procedures.

11:00 AM - 11:50 AM Using SAS for the Design, Analysis, and Visualization of Complex Surveys

Visualizing data, finding estimates for population and model quantities, and checking model validity are challenging in complex surveys because of clustering, unequal weights, and other survey design features. SAS PROC SURVEYMEANS, PROC SURVEYSELECT, and other members of the SURVEY family are powerful tools for designing surveys and analyzing data from complex surveys. Recent developments to these procedures make them more powerful and more flexible than ever before. We present examples from complex surveys to illustrate how the procedures may be used for standard analyses as well as advanced applications such as graphing complex survey data, performing model diagnostics, making inferences employing the bootstrap, and combining data from multiple surveys.

My SAS Global Forum 2012 Timeline - April 26, 2012 - Richard Koopmann