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
I've long been fascinated by both science and the natural world around us, inspired by the amazing Sir David Attenborough with his ever-engaging documentaries and boundless enthusiasm for nature, and also by the late, great Carl Sagan and his ground-breaking documentary series, COSMOS. The relationships between the creatures, plants and
Whether your resolution is to get SAS certified or to become a more advanced SAS programmer, we’ve got you covered with these new titles and upcoming SAS Press books, many of which will be making their bookshelf debut at SAS® Global Forum 2017 in Orlando, FL! Want to be notified when a new book
“La Quinta” is Spanish for “next to Denny’s.” -- Mitch Hedberg, comedian Mitch Hedberg's joke resonates with travelers who drive on the US interstate system because many highway exits feature both a La Quinta Inn™ and a Denny's® restaurant within a short distance of each other. But does a
At SAS, we've published more repositories on GitHub as a way to share our open source projects and examples. These "repos" (that's Git lingo) are created and maintained by experts in R&D, professional services (consulting), and SAS training. Some recent examples include: sas_kernel, which provides Jupyter notebook support for SAS.
Much of my recent work has been along the theme of modernization. Analytics is not new for many of our customers, but standing still in this market is akin to falling behind. In order to continue to innovative and remain competitive, organizations need to be prepared to embrace new technologies
What are the most useful skills a data quality leader can possess? As an editor of an online data quality magazine, I naturally get asked this type of question regularly at events and meetups. My answer may surprise some who are expecting a data-centric response. I firmly believe that sales and
If you do much traveling in the United States, you're bound to hear a few words and expressions that are unique to certain areas. Well y'all get ready, because I'm fixin' to analyze some of those words for ya! I recently found a really neat web application called The Great
I wrote 105 posts for The DO Loop blog in 2016. My most popular articles were about data analysis, SAS programming tips, and elementary statistics. Without further ado, here are the most popular articles from 2016. Data Analysis and Visualization Start with a juicy set of data and an interesting
.@philsimon says that privacy is your issue as well whether you believe it or not.
How many of you have been given a SAS data set with variables such as Age, Height, and Weight and some or all of them were stored as character values instead of numeric? Probably EVERYONE! Yes, we all know how to do the old "swap and drop" (rename and convert), but
Data analysis can be used for many things ... how about finding other beers you might like, so you don't keep drinking the same old brand every time? Hang on tight - I think we're about to make a beer run! I recently read an interesting article on the Flowingdata website,
This SAS Jedi is very excited about the SAS 9.4 M4 release, which brought many wonderful gifts just in time for Christmas. So in the interest of extending the Christmas spirit, I'm going to blog about some of my favorites! I've long loved the SAS DO statement variant which allows
In the previous three blogs in this series, we talked about what metadata can be available from source systems, transformation and movement, and operational usage. For this final blog in the series, I want to discuss the analytical usage of metadata. Let’s set up the scenario. Let's imagine I'm a
Die Digitalisierung wird ja angeblich alles ändern. Oder sogar revolutionieren. Das gilt sowohl für unser Privat- wie auch das Berufsleben. Unsere Arbeitsweisen und Gewohnheiten werden sich an die digitale Gesellschaft anpassen. Ob wir wollen oder nicht. Gleichfalls werden sich Strukturen und Organisationsformen in Unternehmen verändern. Und diese Veränderungen machen auch
How can you generate data that contains outliers in a simulation study? The contaminated normal distribution is a simple but useful distribution you can use to simulate outliers. The distribution is easy to explain and understand, and it is also easy to implement in SAS. What is a contaminated normal
SAS temporary arrays are an underutilized jewel in the SAS toolbox. I find that many beginning to intermediate SAS programmers are not familiar with temporary arrays. The good news is that there is nothing complicated about them and they are very useful. First of all, what is a temporary array?
It’s no secret that the US energy landscape has undergone massive changes in recent years: the emergence of cost-effective renewables, the natural gas revolution, the wide-scale penetration of intelligence across energy delivery networks, and soon a new resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. All of these changes are impacting different pockets of
It's that time of year again. Holidays, parties, gifts, cooking, closing annual business, hitting targets and preparing for 2017. Looking back on the year for the communication and media industries, it has been a year of transition for the industry and for many of the customers I work with in my role
