In my last post I described "4 adaptability attributes for analytical success," and in the past I've discussed the strategic role analytics play in helping organizations succeed now and into the future. Now I'd like to discuss three attributes that define a powerful analytics environment: Speed Accuracy Scalability [NOTE: Any
I've been working on a pilot project recently with a client to test out some new NoSQL database frameworks (graph databases in particular). Our goal is to see how a different storage model, representation and presentation can enhance the usability and ease of integration for master data indexes and entity
Tell me if you’ve heard this before: Your company hired (or re-titled) a talented data scientist and they have great skills and no data. Or they're marginalized by IT because they're misunderstood. They're offered “cleansed” data that will fit into the hardware provisioned. What they want is “all” relevant data
Are you one of those people who get easily bored at amusement parks? Would you like something to do while your friends/family are waiting in line for a ride? Perhaps I have an alternate idea, to keep you busy - survey markers! When surveyors are measuring and marking areas for
This article shows how to simulate a data set in SAS that satisfies a least squares regression model for continuous variables. When you simulate to create "synthetic" (or "fake") data, you (the programmer) control the true parameter values, the form of the model, the sample size, and magnitude of the
Editor's note (10/25/17): You can practice what you learned in class with 15 hours of Free virtual lab time when you attend the in-person or Live Web Applied Analytics Using SAS Enterprise Miner class. Register now. Are you interested in taking an advanced course on the machine learning topic of Neural Networks? Does text
Historically, tax havens have been a key tool for tax evaders to store and hide unreported and untaxed money. I would agree with most observers that the Panama papers (11.5 million leaked documents that detail financial information for more than 214,488 offshore entities) are just the tip of the tax
In a previous blog, Random Sampling: What's Efficient?, I discussed the efficiency of various techniques for selecting a simple random sample from a large SAS dataset. PROC SURVEYSELECT easily does the job: proc surveyselect data=large out=sample method=srs /* simple random sample */ rate=.01; /* 1% sample rate */ run; Note:
We are a few months away from SAS Global Forum in Orlando. You might think that the conference kicks off Sunday night at opening session, but there are plenty of weekend activities before then and I’d like to highlight one of them: SAS certification exam sessions. Isn’t now a great
The SAS analytical documentation has a new look. Beginning with the 14.2 release of the SAS analytical products (which shipped with SAS 9.4m4 in November 2016), the HTML version of the online documentation has moved to a new framework called the Help Center. The URL for the online documentation is
I continue to find the concept of explaining analytics through storytelling intriguing. As I have written before, at first blush this did not seem immediately clear to me. The advice to use storytelling appeared somewhat vague, trite and without substance. More importantly, it seemed to conflict with the rigor required
"They'll eat you out of house & home! Their food bill will put you in the poor house! ... And they never gain an ounce!" - That's what my friends say about their teenage sons. They're probably exaggerating a little, but since it's a recurring theme, there's probably some truth
As the application stack supporting big data has matured, it has demonstrated the feasibility of ingesting, persisting and analyzing potentially massive data sets that originate both within and outside of conventional enterprise boundaries. But what does this mean from a data governance perspective?
This predictive analytics post continues a blog series that highlights education leaders sharing successes and challenges of using data to drive school improvement. Sampson County Schools is a small rural school district in southeastern North Carolina. While overall graduation rates in the county were improving, one school wanted to do
Here in the US, it's Girl Scout cookie season. This is when you get to spend a few bucks on cookies, break your New Year's resolution about losing weight ... and feel good about it, because the money's going to a good cause. Or is it? - Let's break down
Improving citizen happiness is an important goal for many, if not all, governments. But what is happiness really? Can it be objectively measured? Can we discover the key factors that best correlate with happiness? And ultimately, can governments implement policies and programs that maximize happiness? Is maximum happiness nothing more than
This article shows how to solve mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problems in SAS. In a mixed integer problem, some of the variables in the problem are integer-valued whereas others are continuous. The objective function is a linear function of the variables and the variables can be subject to linear
We've all seen it before – a truck on the side of the road with the hood up and the driver desperate to figure out what’s wrong. In this situation, not only is a customer not receiving goods on time, but the problem is exacerbated by the fact that most
After reading a recent LinkedIn post by Jeff Haden, "Want to Achieve Lifelong Success? An Army Ranger Says You Need This 1 Trait the Most", (spoiler alert: It's adaptability) something occurred to me. One of the reasons I enjoy solving business problems with analytics is that analytics is all about
For many years, the Toyota Prius was the hybrid with the best mpg - but in 2017 that's changing! Let's examine the data ... For analyses like this, I have found the fueleconomy.gov website to be a wonderful source of information. In recent years, they've even made all their data
For SAS programmers, the PUT statement in the DATA step and the %PUT macro statement are useful statements that enable you to display the values of variables and macro variables, respectively. By default, the output appears in the SAS log. This article shares a few tips that help you to
In the word of digital marketing, one of the more controversial moves I’ve seen recently was from U.K. car insurer Admiral. The company recently announced that it would begin offering car insurance discounts to less risky customers based on voluntarily provided social media data. The insurer would analyze Facebook likes
Previously, I discussed ways to create a Box Plot with Stat Table and Markers in the linked article. One of the graphs showed a Box Plot of Cholesterol by Death cause along with the display of the actual observations. The main goal for that article was display of statistics with
They say "a picture is worth 1000 words" - and I think it might be more like 2000 when it comes to planning out fun/interesting things to do in a new city! I'm going to the SAS Global Forum (#SASGF) conference in Orlando this year, and I was wondering where
A number of posts on SAS Voices have touched upon the theme of modernization. This is certainly a hot topic with our customers as many of them continue to be interested in taking advantage of the evolving software landscape. The thing is, modernization can be hard. I should know, I’ve been
.@philsimon looks at the challenges and opportunities that big data pose for data governance.
Omnichannel shoppers have been disrupting retailers for years, and its likely to top the industry’s agenda of challenges for years to come. But optimization, an omnichannel analytics technology, can help harness the positives of omnichannel retailing and minimize showrooming. Consider this everyday retail dilemma: E-commerce sales are growing, but in-store
Last week I wrote about the 10 most popular articles from The DO Loop in 2016. The popular articles tend to be about elementary topics that appeal to a wide range of SAS programmers. Today I present an "editor's choice" list of technical articles that describe more advanced statistical methods
Streaming technologies have been around for years, but as Felix Liao recently blogged, the numbers and types of use cases that can take advantage of these technologies have now increased exponentially. I've blogged about why streaming is the most effective way to handle the volume, variety and velocity of big data. That's
In the beginning, SAS created procedures and output. The output was formless and void. Then SAS said, "Let there be ODS," and there was ODS. Customers saw that ODS was good, and SAS separated the computation from the display and management of output. The preceding paragraph oversimplifies the SAS Output
