December 2015

Dec 29, 2015

Intro to SAS Macro Programming (Part 1)


Trying different statistical languages and being confortable with them is a big advantage for today's statisticians and data scientists.
This is why I wanted to do this series of posts that will include (besides R and Python) SAS, SAS Macro , Julia..etc


What is SAS?

I will try to be as unbiased as possible here. According to its Wikipedia page, SAS  is a software suite that can mine, alter, manage and retrieve data from a variety of sources and perform statistical analysis on it.

SAS has a multitude of procedures specialized in statistical analysis, data manipulation and visualisation.

SAS programming consists on writing the code composed by SAS Data Steps and SAS Procedures, and Executing it.

The concepts of parameters and variables is included in the SAS Macros.



Dec 19, 2015

The hard thing about hard things: Teaching experience Feedback


Today was the last day of my Statistical Analysis Software course I gave at the Higher School of Statistics and Data Analysis of Tunis.

The only thing that's left is the final exam, so the work is not over...Yet!

It is important to mention that teaching is a -very- hard thing to do, especially if you are a "caring" person and you do CARE about perfection and small details.

I have tried to be as reachable as possible to all my students, especially at the beginning of the class, when they were new and haven't had any significant statistical of computing background.


A Summary of the points I have given in the class this semester



Making everybody happy and all the course material easy is not the goal here. The most important thing is to make sure that all the details are delivered to all students and that all the questions they ask about the course are answered.