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Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Analysis (or RFM) is a popular customer segmentation technique employed by database marketers everywhere. Marketers use RFM to identify which customers are most likely to respond to a direct marketing campaign. The model takes into account three simple metrics: How recently did the customer buy from
A large variety of graphs fall in the category of what I call a "Single-Cell" graph. This type of graph consists of a single data region along with titles, footnotes, legends and other ancillary objects. Legends and text entries can be included in the data area. The data itself is displayed

SHA256 and other hash functions are supported in SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya. It's better than MD5 as a cryptographic hash!

Wohl jeder hat es sich in seinem Berufsleben schon das ein oder andere Mal gewünscht: etwas weniger Kontrolle und etwas mehr Laissez-Faire. Der bewusste Verzicht auf Grenzen oder Vorgaben unterstützt einerseits den Freiraum, das Vertrauen und die Kreativität, birgt aber andererseits auch viele Risiken.

Watching the news recently it occurred to me that many of the stories involved data in some way. Many of the reports from the recent Consumer Electronics Show showcased products to enable users to create and use ever-growing personal collections of data. Want data on how well you sleep? No

Starting with SAS 9.4, not only will SAS administrators see lots of processes running on your operating system supporting the various SAS servers (such as SAS Metadata server), you will also see two new processes that have a description of “agent” running. Agents are software processes responsible for tasks such

Every day of the year is an official 'national day' for something - here's a SAS chart to help you find which bizarre 'national day' falls on your birthday! I recently read an article that lists weird and unconventional national days. It was very interesting, but I found the data

Vector languages such as SAS/IML, MATLAB, and R are powerful because they enable you to use high-level matrix operations (matrix multiplication, dot products, etc) rather than loops that perform scalar operations. In general, vectorized programs are more efficient (and therefore run faster) than programs that contain loops. For an example

So Ed and I have started the new year right by taking a trip. We’re in Washington, DC for the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society. (These dudes have been getting together for a long time.) Here’s the fun part: we’re showing off a cool new eBook that SAS

When you create maps, you are typically plotting data for analytics -- but you can also use SAS to create 'pretty' maps for background decorations (for posters, slides, presentations, etc). This blog shows you a few examples... A few years ago I noticed that the CNN Situation Room had a decorative

Plakatwände, Werbeblocks im Fernsehen, Postwurfsendungen, Werbe-Mails – so unterschiedlich die Kanäle und Formate auch sind, sie haben alle etwas gemein. Sie sind typische Formen des „Unterbrechungsmarketings" - ein Marketing, das die Konsumenten immer häufiger ermüdet, langweilt oder schlichtweg nervt. Der Grund: Die Relevanz fehlt. Denn der weitaus größte Teil dieser

Software performance is a complex topic. The answer to every question depends—depends on hardware, depends on operating system, architecture, time of day, number of users and so on. (Margaret Crevar gave us some insight into that complexity in her January 2013 post Improving performance: Understand the problem.) That’s why we

Do you make New Year’s Resolutions? Do you typically achieve them? Studies say that only about 40-50% of us make New Year’s Resolutions each year, and unfortunately very few of us actually succeed. Why is that? Were they unrealistic? Did we prepare to succeed? Were we ready to make a
Following Sanjay's cue (see “R U Graphing with SAS”), I tried creating data driven multi-cell graphs using R. I played with the lattice and ggplot2 packages. I found ggplot2 simpler to understand and use than lattice, but there are probably some trades offs. Data-driven layouts are referred to as 'faceting'

In 2013 I published 110 blog posts. Some of these articles were more popular than others, often because they were linked to from a SAS newsletter such as the SAS Statistics and Operations Research News. In no particular order, here are some of my most popular posts from 2013, organized