Logistic regression using SAS On-Demand with SAS Enterprise Guide – a movie and a rant

If you have a mad desire to do logistic regression with SAS On-Demand with SAS Enterprise Guide, here is a movie that shows how to do it. It is a .avi file so you may want to just download it and run it on your PC.

Here is why the movie is not all that good — Grrr —  SAS On-Demand does not run on a Mac. Unfortunately, Quicktime does a screen capture video on the Mac version but the Windows version only the professional version does that. I used Debut Video Capture on Windows, which I actually paid for. I made one movie, made a mistake in the middle of it and the guinea pigs were raising a ruckus because they wanted parsley. You could here them squeaking all through it.  So, the second try, when I was doing logistic regression, the sound track was about 15 or 20 seconds ahead of the video! So, as you were listening to the video, you were seeing something different on the screen! That was annoying. So … this third video is a bit sparse.

I also ran tasks before I did the video so I did not have to wait forever for them to run. I ran it on this old, old windows machine we use for testing because I did not want to take the time to re-boot my shiny new 12GB RAM Mac into Windows. That was stupid. It would have been quicker to re-boot the Mac than re-do the movie twice. Also, my Mac has a wired Internet connection so it is much faster all the way around.

Lessons learned today in addition to logistic regression.

1. When using SAS On-Demand, use the fastest computer

2. When using SAS On-Demand, use the fastest Internet connection

3. Get the Windows version of Quicktime to replace Debut Video Capture (there are other reasons  I don’t like it, chief among them being the default format is .avi and if you change it to some other format, it does NOT remember that)

I have had SO much more of a positive experience with the SAS Web Editor – runs on a Mac, faster, no install problem – that I wonder why I ever used SAS Enterprise Guide to begin with. Actually, if you are running it in your office or home with a good Internet connection on a good computer, it’s not too bad. Not only is the lack of programming attractive to many students but from a learning statistics standpoint the fact that it kind of is in your face with the “Dependent variable”, “Classification variable”, “Quantitative variable” distinctions is kind of nice.

Most of all, though, I remembered how clunky SAS Enterprise Guide for the desktop was when it first came out and now I find it very useful, so I am HOPING this will be the direction for SAS On-Demand EG as well. Personally, the single biggest improvement I hope for is that it starts to run on the Mac. The simplest way for that to happen would be if it just ran as a client like the web editor does. Here’s hoping.