Yesterday I recommended Steve Morlidge’s The Little Book of Beyond Budgeting, for helping to illuminate the troubling usage of business forecasts in the traditional management / budgeting process. Steve reached out to me overnight with some additional points that he shares in this guest blogger post. Steve Morlidge on Forecasts
The dramatic drop in crude oil prices from the highs above $100USD per barrel down to levels around $50 per barrel is one of the drivers behind the industry’s march towards improved operating efficiency. Along the corridors of Independent Oil Companies (IOCs) and National Oil Companies (NOCs), machine learning and
In the spirit of my Forecasting Sharknadoes blog post, I now bring you Sunsquatch! In this blog post, I create a map that helps you find a location where you can see the total eclipse *and* have a chance of seeing Bigfoot (aka, Sasquatch)! But before we get into the nitty-gritty
Is There Something Beyond Budgeting? Forecasting is an integral part of the business planning and budgeting process. Presumably the forecast (which should be an "unbiased best guess" at what is really going to happen in the future) can provide a reasonable foundation upon which the annual budget and operating plans
When I first started teaching JMP classes for SAS Education 10 years ago, I sat in to observe a colleague teaching our introductory JMP data exploration course. The students had lots of questions about using JMP for their own projects, and were excited to learn about all the capabilities of
This is the fourth post in my series of 10 machine learning best practices. It’s common to build models on historical training data and then apply the model to new data to make decisions. This process is called model deployment or scoring. I often hear data scientists say, “It took
There will be a total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017, and the umbra (total shadow) will pass right across the United States! As a data guy, a map guy, and an astronomy fan, this is an opportunity I just couldn't pass up! Follow along as I apply my computer skills
August’s move of the month is the Overhead Squat. It is a multi-joint movement that incorporates a squat as well as significant shoulder mobility and core strength. Although it seems quite simple, the technique takes time to learn, so start with something like a broomstick or PVC pipe to familiarize
Last week I blogged about the broken-stick problem in probability, which reminded me that the broken-stick model is one of the many techniques that have been proposed for choosing the number of principal components to retain during a principal component analysis. Recall that for a principal component analysis (PCA) of
Did you pay your taxes? From stiff penalties to even jail time, the federal government provides plenty of incentive for citizens to pay, but each year nearly one in five Americans do not pay on time. This leads to a more than $450 billion gap in unpaid taxes, creating a
David Loshin recommends enforcing governed standards to help avoid conflicting analytical results.
A lot of tourists flock to North Carolina. We have beaches, wreck diving, and lighthouses. We have the Great Smoky Mountains with whitewater kayaking, colorful fall leaves, and snow skiing. We have hot air balloon festivals & Scottish highland games. Oh, and some of the best barbecue you've ever tasted! But
A SAS user needed to convert a program from MATLAB into the SAS/IML matrix language and asked whether there is a SAS/IML equivalent to the fliplr and flipud functions in MATLAB. These functions flip the columns or rows (respectively) of a matrix; "LR" stands for "left-right" and "UD" stands for
When we talk about consent management for the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), one of the key considerations is “consent for a purpose.” It might have been sufficient in the past to provide a form with a single generic consent check box and store the fact that consent was
IIF Tao Hong Award Dr. Tao Hong is a friend, former SAS colleague, former SAS basketball league opponent, a major contributor to SAS Energy Forecasting software, and now Associate Professor at UNC Charlotte. When he isn't raining three-pointers on me on the basketball court, Tao is Director of the Big
I hate my title, but I’m going to stick with it. In spite of it, I hope I can encourage you to pay attention to the current automation revolution and actively contribute to augmention-fueled innovation. If everyone understands those terms and actively tries to stay on top of how they
I recently saw an interesting PEW study showing the percent of each state's revenue that came from federal funds. They had some pretty nice graphs ... but just like jell-o, there's always room for more graphs, eh! Let's start with the map. Their map had an informative title, a reasonable gradient
I use SAS Enterprise Guide every day, and for a wide variety of tasks. As a result, I have a huge collection of project files (EGP files) and SAS program files. I have always relied on the "recently used" list in the File menu to provide me with quick access
“I do not like this modern technology,” said my father-in-law. “It is making people too lazy. Things are too easy now.” He was referring to my grocery order. I was sitting in his kitchen in Reykjavik, Iceland, the day before my return to the United States. I had just explained
A classical problem in elementary probability asks for the expected lengths of line segments that result from randomly selecting k points along a segment of unit length. It is both fun and instructive to simulate such problems. This article uses simulation in the SAS/IML language to estimate solutions to the
This is the third post in my series of machine learning techniques and best practices. If you missed the earlier posts, read the first one now, or review the whole machine learning best practices series. Data scientists commonly use machine learning algorithms, such as gradient boosting and decision forests, that automatically build
Too much to do and not enough time to do it. That's a common refrain in government, but an important one because of the critical role government plays in the lives of so many. In a new book from SAS, A Practical Guide to Analytics for Governments: Using Big Data
When it comes to economic activity, a handful of the largest metropolitan areas in the US account for lion's share. In 2013, the top 23 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) accounted for 50% of the total US Gross Domestic Product (GDP). I recently came across a map created by Alexandr Trubetskoy
디지털 시대의 도래와 함께 수많은 정보와 데이터가 빠르게 생성되면서 사회 다양한 분야에서 빅데이터가 폭넓게 활용되고 있습니다. 기업들도 비즈니스 데이터를 수집, 분석해서 상당한 가치를 얻을 수 있음을 잘 이해하고 있는데요. 하지만 사실 분석 활동이라는 개념은 예전부터 있었습니다. 수십 년 전인 1950년대에도 기업들은 트렌드를 파악하고 인사이트를 얻기 위해 기본적인 분석을 하고 있었습니다.
“Es una apuesta de la compañía”. Con esta frase, muchas empresas de la industria de bienes de consumo (CPG, por sus siglas en inglés) describen su decisión de introducir un nuevo producto al mercado. En el enunciado, la referencia al juego no es gratuita. En este sector, lanzar una novedad,
Jim Harris considers whether we can save private data in the age of big data.
4차 산업혁명은 전 세계 산업 구조는 물론 교육 환경에도 큰 영향을 미치고 있습니다. 지난 몇 년간 빅데이터, 사물인터넷(IoT), 인공지능(AI) 등 산업혁명을 이끄는 기술을 다루기 위해 필수적인 STEM(과학, 기술, 공학, 수학) 분야 교육에 대한 수요과 공급이 증가했는데요. 이처럼 STEM 교육에 대한 관심이 높아지면서 드러난 명암이 있습니다. 전 세계적으로 STEM 분야의 여성 비율은
In the first half of 2017 and in my only domain – which is marketing – an announcement set the tone for a major change. How not to be stunned when “Coca-Cola ditches global CMO role in leadership shake-up”? If there is only one product you can find anywhere on
For a time series { y1, y2, ..., yN }, the difference operator computes the difference between two observations. The kth-order difference is the series { yk+1 - y1, ..., yN - yN-k }. In SAS, the DIF function in the DATA step computes differences between observations. The DIF function
I've been a SAS programmer for 26 years and counting. I started with the Display Management System (DMS) interface into SAS, which today is referred to as the window environment (and yes, I have used the command line interface as well, which is still available today). DMS consisted of three initial
