Completely unrelated to statistics, software or, anything really, my darling daughter number three is ranked in the top ten in the world in mixed martial arts. She has been nominated for female fighter of the year, which is decided in a scientific, objective manner by how many votes the nominees get on the Internet. She…
Jon Peltier and I were going back and forth on twitter about why it is that people will post answers on a forum or mailing list that are completely incorrect. As Peter Flom says, “They are often in error but never in doubt.” Jon suggested there are three types; those who don’t know and admit…
I read Allen Englehardt’s post this morning, on R vs SAS/SPSS in corporations and it motivated me to set aside my infinite to-do list and write about something I’ve been thinking for a long time. Since Allen writes on R-bloggers, it will surprise no one that his conclusion was that R is preferable to SAS…
Two things, first of all. Those folks in Colorado are unbelievable studs to come out in inches of snow and more falling to a full house at the Denver & northern Colorado / Wyoming SAS users group meeting. I’ll bet the people in North Dakota are…
Let me just say off the bat that open data is awesome and there should be more of it available. This semester, I have been using SAS On-Demand in my statistics class and creating the data sets to meet students’ interests. Despite some people’s aspersions that I read on Twitter that some statisticians know no…
Unfamiliar jargon like Kaplan-Meier curves, PROC PHREG, right-censored and hazard functions can be daunting to the newcomer. Survival analysis is really quite straightforward; it is simply a set of statistical techniques used when the focus is “time to event”. The event can be death, divorce, arrest, substance abuse or literally anything else. You’ve been wanting…
Next question on categorical data analysis … Correlated proportions. There are a lot of reasons why you might have correlated data in a two-way contingency table. The most common is that you have measured people twice. I have heard people say that including discussion of homosexuality in school makes it more likely that children…
The other day I wrote about how I had never had the need to do a binomial test for a proportion with SAS. In my business, at least, the question of whether the proportion in the population equals X just doesn’t come up very often. Actually, given that I had taught not one, but two…
Anyone who claims to know all of SAS is clinically insane – Ernest Hemingway (not intended to be a factual attribution) Okay, I admit it, Hemingway didn’t really say that, but he would have, except for being dead and all. As usual, this year I didn’t have time to do everything I wanted at the…
At the opening session, Randy Guard from SAS talked about making a difference. That sounded promising, but then the examples he gave were how analyses could be run on large databases of stock market data so much more quickly that instead of having market value overnight traders could get the data hourly. It sounded like…