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Becoming an Expert Statistician (or Mathematician or Programmer)

It’s not often that you read a paragraph and it sticks in your mind for months. That this particular paragraph came not from some great literary work but rather from the proceedings of the annual meeting of the Association of Small Computer Users in Education is even more expected, but there it is. Douglas Kranch…

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What I Do: A Day in the Life of a Consultant

I have a confession to make. As a sixteen-year-old college freshman, I had no idea what people in business did. As a nineteen-year-old college graduate, with a BSBA, I didn’t know much more.  My more affluent classmates had internships in the summer. My scholarship covered my tuition and sometimes room and board but left a…

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Learning Advanced SAS from a Macro: Part 4

Continuing to learn Advanced SAS from the Propensity Score Matching with Calipers macro from Feng, Yu & Xu , we take our data set we created by doing a principal components analysis on the cases (experimental) group, using the coefficients from that analysis to score every record in our control group, concatenating the cases and controls,…

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Learning Advanced SAS from a Macro: Part 2

Okay, where we left off on the propensity score macro from Feng, Wu and Xu and the nifty things you can learn from reading someone else’s code, in this case, their propensity score macro with calipers …. We previously dealt with the situation where you had no matches and exactly one match. If you find…

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You learn one programming language, you’ve learned them all (sort of): SPSS Quintiles Example

Recently, I had the need to write the exact same programs twice, once using SAS and once using SPSS syntax. Even though these aren’t the same language, having done it once made it much easier to do it the second time. Let’s start with quintile matching. I’ve been rambling on about propensity scores lately and…