Despite my preference for SAS over R, there are some add-ons to “basic” R that I’ve found that have made my learning process way easier.  While I’m still in my infancy in learning R, I feel like once I found … Continue reading →Getting Started Using R, Part 1: RStudio ... [Read more...]

For the past 18 months, it seems like all I’ve heard about in the digital marketing industry is “big data”, and with that, mentions of using Hadoop and R to solve these sorts of problems.  Why are these tools the … Continue reading →Learning R has really made me appreciate SAS ... [Read more...]

Learning to use a data analysis tool well takes significant effort, so people tend to continue using the tool they learned in college for much of their careers. As a result, the software used by professors and their students is … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The European Court of Justice has published its decision in SAS v WPL; the title of the press release says it all “The functionality of a computer program and the programming language cannot be protected by copyright”. To summarise the background, World Programming Ltd developed a system that was capable ... [Read more...]

I’m a bit obsessive with words. May be I should have used learning in the title, rather than teaching code. Or perhaps remembering code. You know? Code where one actually has very clear idea of what is going on; for … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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Here is an interview with Kai Chew, Founder of Cloudstat. CloudStat is developing a cloud-based statistical platform to help researchers who want to make sense of data to do statistical analysis collaboratively with its high performance computing infra... [Read more...]

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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 ... [Read more...]

A short while ago there was a discussion on linkedin about the use of SAS versus R for the enterprise. I have thought a bit about the issue but, as I do not use Linkedin, I did not make any … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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 subheaders where 1 expected" are now a thing of the past. These improvements are largely due to work by Clint Cummins. The function also ... [Read more...]

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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: ... [Read more...]

Guest post by Bob Agnew ([email protected]) —————- Introduction Marketing optimization consists of assigning offers to prospects in order to [Read more...]

By Brian Kimball: http://code.google.com/p/sasquatch [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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Robert Muenchen, the author of R for SAS and SPSS Users (A great book I’m proud to have on my shelf), has published this week an article in which he compares the [Read more...]