Charlie Chase is considered an expert in sales forecasting, market response modeling, econometrics and supply chain management. Now he's sharing some of his expertise in his Business Knowledge Series (BKS) course, Best Practices in Demand-Driven Forecasting. I had the chance to ask him some questions about his course and the
This week, I finally ate some liver, for the first time in over 20 years - and I realized it's a lot like prepping data (which I'll explain in this blog post). Here are a few of the similarities: They're both good for you. Thinking about them makes you go
It is January. In the United States, this means NFL playoff time! A perfect time (if you are a geeky SAS/OR guy) to use PROC OPTGRAPH to rank the best teams in the NFL. Ranking Sports Teams Ranking of sports teams is a popular (and controversial) topic, especially in the
Calling All Forecasters Have you tried Forecast Value Added analysis? What did you find out? Are you willing to share your learnings (at least those that can be revealed publicly)?Would you like to be featured in a new blog series on FVA, published by the Institute of Business Forecasting? The IBF was
My colleagues at the SAS & R blog recently posted an example of how to program a permutation test in SAS and R. Their SAS implementation used Base SAS and was "relatively cumbersome" (their words) when compared with the R code. In today's post I implement the permutation test in
Last week I had the opportunity to attend the INFORMS Annual Meeting in San Francisco. For those of you not familiar with this organization or conference, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is the largest society in the world for professionals in the field of operations
It's time for a fall fraud roundup. Bad deeds swirl around like so many dry leaves, and I'd like to highlight a few of them this week. It can happen anywhere, even in sports, and no, I'm not picking on those shoplifting Dallas Cowboys here. An MLS referee was suspended for workers' compensation
Finding people with the range of skills classified as data science can be a challenge, which is why some call them unicorns (do they really exist?), so I recently posted ten tips on finding unicorns. In my first post I elaborated on tips 1 and 2 (1. hire from an
The Chicago weather cooperated for MWSUG 2014 with nice crisp fall temperatures, clear skies and beautiful sunrises over the lake. Aside from the weather, here are my five favorite memories of MWSUG 2014: 1. Location-location-location. The location and venue were fabulous! Not only were we along the Chicago River with a beautiful
The Mid-West SAS Users' Group conference in Chicago was a great success, with over 400 attendees and great weather. The conference hotel was in downtown with nice view of the river and a stroll down "Magnificent Mile". The city does a great job with the flower beds down Michigan Ave., along
As you can tell from my recent posts (see here and here), I've been working with SAS and Microsoft Excel files quite a bit. I'm really enjoying the ability to import an XLSX file in my 64-bit SAS for Windows without any additional setup. After one long afternoon of back-and-forth
Let's get one thing straight: I'm no wuss. Well, at least *I* don't think so. But on September 3-5, 2014, I gladly joined ranks with over 400 WUSSes descending on the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose for the Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS) Educational Forum and Conference. It
The Third PharmaSUG-China conference was held in Beijing last week, and I had the pleasure to attend this excellent conference along with a record number of attendees. On Thursday, I presented two 1/2 day seminars on ODS Graphics. One titled "Advanced Topics in GTL" and another titled "Complex Clinical Graphs
If you are trying to visualize numerical data that range over several magnitudes, conventional wisdom says that a log transformation of the data can often result in a better visualization. This article shows several ways to create a scatter plot with logarithmic axes in SAS and discusses some of the
It was almost two weeks ago that I got started making a display for lab tests for a subject, based on a graph I saw on the web for an article on this blog. This graph is a part of a larger panel display of the lab values for a
Bootstrap methods and permutation tests are popular and powerful nonparametric methods for testing hypotheses and approximating the sampling distribution of a statistic. I have described a SAS/IML implementation of a bootstrap permutation test for matched pairs of data (an alternative to a matched-pair t test) in my paper "Modern Data
Imagine this scenario: Every device we encounter in our day-to-day routine – from our refrigerators and automobiles to our water and gas meters – has embedded sensors that read real-time information and generate unfathomable amounts of data. Now take this scenario one step further. Imagine what kinds of insights we’d
It’s an understatement to say there are many Base SAS procedures! Some procedures may be used for basic report writing. Other procedures may be used to perform statistical analysis. Some have similar functions. Others are unique in the output that they can produce. Which procedure you choose generally depends on
I'm currently working on a large project for a SAS customer. The project comprises many activities and phases, so there is a need to track progress on many different levels. During a recent meeting the project manager announced, "I'm putting together a status deck, and I'll include some Harvey Balls
SAS Global Forum 2014 was a great success, with the SAS Studio, a web based SAS interface garnering a lot of attention. SAS also announced the availability of SAS Analytics U, providing free web based access to SAS analytics for students, faculty and researchers. The conference had multiple paper and Super demos on data
We can watch games on TV, rent a movie from Redbox, and Google our favorite SAS procedures when we’ve forgotten how something works. There are a myriad of ways to get entertained or educated in a second-hand way. But, whether it’s being at the ballpark, in a theater, or at
Most SAS programmers would agree that they use the SET statement without giving much thought to the syntax, because it’s such a widely used statement of choice. We routinely name the expected data sets and possibly a few options, and away we go. A visit to the documentation can be
Last week's SAS Talks session, My Favorite SAS Enterprise Guide 5.1 Tricks, was remarkable in several ways. First, the featured presenter was Marje Fecht, who also serves as the conference chair for SAS Global Forum 2014. She's an avid SAS professional who loves to educate her fellow SAS users on
It's true: you can use the Microsoft Visual Studio Express tools to build custom tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide and the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. And I said as much in my book, Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide Using Microsoft .NET. I even provided step-by-step instructions for how
This week's SAS tip comes from Michael Tuchman and his book PROC DOCUMENT by Example Using SAS. Michael, a senior statistician, has been using SAS since 1999. And his experience comes through in his book. It's received strong reviews including this one from SAS user Wendi Wright: "Currently, I believe PROC DOCUMENT is a highly
In this quarter's installment of the SAS/Foresight Webinar Series, Martin Joseph and Alec Finney of Rivershill Consultancy discuss "The Forecasting Mantra." Based on their article in the Winter 2009 issue of Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting, the webinar provides a template that identifies all the elements required to achieve sustained, world-class forecasting
Interested in text mining? This week's SAS tip is from the new book - Text Mining and Analysis: Practical Methods, Examples, and Case Studies Using SAS by Goutam Chakraborty, Murali Pagolu, and Satish Garla. This hands-on guide is getting strong early reviews - and perhaps you'd like to write your own after reading the
My children learned this skill early in life: when you want to secure permission for a questionable activity (say, "watch 5 hours of Phineas and Ferb" or "eat a bowl of candy for breakfast"), you should approach the most lenient adult in the household. In my early days of fatherhood,
Last week I covered some of the interesting graph-related papers presented at WUSS. There were quite a few, so I broke up the report into two parts. Here is the second installment. In the paper Creating Graphical Patient Profiles using SAS by William Garner of Gilead Sciences, the author describes how to create
Twitter is becoming an important data source for organizations who want to better understand customer feedback on social channels. Before you can analyze Twitter data, however, you’ll need to import it into SAS. This post explains one way to do just that. Twitter supports authentication methods such as OAuth signed
