Last week I showed how to find the nearest neighbors for a set of d-dimensional points. A SAS user wrote to ask whether something similar could be done when you have two distinct groups of points and you want to find the elements in the second group that are closest
“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle, or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a
I recently read a very interesting article describing how analytics is being used to detect cheating/copying/re-use in crossword puzzle creation, in some of the major news publications. This inspired me to try my hand at creating a totally new & unique crossword puzzle ... of course using SAS software! :) My grandmother
NIJ's Real-Time Forecasting Challenge If you want to show off your forecasting chops, and maybe even make a little money, the National Institute of Justice has just the challenge for you. The NIJ's Real-Time Crime Forecasting Challenge: ...seeks to harness the advances in data science to address the challenges of
Just in time for the Strata + Hadoop World Conference, SAS became the first software vendor to achieve ODPi Interoperability with our Base SAS® and SAS/ACCESS® Interface to Hadoop products. Now, that's a lot to digest – so let me back up a second and give some background as to what this
Recently, I was talking to a director of analytics from a large telecommunications company, and I asked her, “Do you think we have a skills shortage?” She replied, “NO, I think we’re just looking in the wrong place.” I wanted to hear more as this analytics expert may have just
Are you ready to expand your programming skills and become a more versatile programmer? Then this new (and free!) course might be for you. SAS Programming for R Users is a free course aimed at helping R programmers who want to learn SAS. The goal is for you to be comfortable accomplishing
My son is taking an AP Statistics course in high school this year. AP Statistics is one of the fastest-growing AP courses, so I welcome the chance to see topics and techniques in the course. Last week I was pleased to see that they teach data exploration techniques, such as
What if you could predict with near-perfect accuracy what you’re going to sell and when your customer is going to buy? Right supply, right time is the goal German manufacturers have set themselves, without reducing the configuration options customers expect. Having almost completed stage 1 of their plan – changing
Last time I checked, there are well over 500 functions and call routines in SAS. I’ve taught SAS programming courses for 15 years, and I’ll admit that occasionally my students will ask me about a particular function that I have honestly never heard of. I remember the first time this
In my last post, we explored the operational facet of data governance and data stewardship. We focused on the challenges of providing a scalable way to assess incoming data sources, identify data quality rules and define enforceable data quality policies. As the number of acquired data sources increases, it becomes
I started young. Since I was 9 years old, I’ve always loved cooking delicious, tasty and healthy food, and feeding friends and family. My aunt still remembers the delicious chocolate soufflé that trembled and shook but would never collapse that I made for them when I was 18! Word spread.
Although statisticians often assume normally distributed errors, there are important processes for which the error distribution has a heavy tail. A well-known heavy-tailed distribution is the t distribution, but the t distribution is unsuitable for some applications because it does not have finite moments (means, variance,...) for small parameter values.
Desde la aparición de la banca electrónica, ya hace varios años, las empresas y las personas se han visto favorecidos en gran medida, dado que ofrece grandes beneficios para ambos sectores de consumo. Sin embargo, ahora nos enfocaremos en analizar dos de las principales soluciones que este tipo de servicios
Data science may be a difficult term to define, but data scientists are definitely in great demand! Wayne Thompson, Senior Product Manager at SAS, defines data science as a broad field that entails applying domain knowledge and machine learning to extract insights from complex and often dark data. To further
When shopping for a new TV, with many sets next to each other across a store wall, it is easy to compare the picture quality and brightness. What is not immediately evident and expected is the difference between how the set looked in the store and how it looks in your
As I've previously written, data analytics historically analyzed data after it stopped moving and was stored, often in a data warehouse. But in the era of big data, data needs to be continuously analyzed while it’s still in motion – that is, while it’s streaming. This allows for capturing the real-time value of data
Die Springer-WG im Silicon Valley wurde zunächst belächelt und beargwöhnt. Hat es das schon einmal gegeben? Ein deutscher Konzern schickt eine Handvoll seiner Top-Manager für einen längeren Aufenthalt in eine andere Weltgegend mit dem Auftrag, die Geschäftsmodelle der Zukunft zu sondieren. Herausgekommen sind ikonisch gewordene Bilder eines Vollbart tragenden Kai
Last week, one of the major pipelines supplying gasoline to the eastern US broke. Do you know where the break is, and which states will be having shortages? Me neither! ... So, of course, I created a SAS map to help... First I read up about the spill on various
Wheat rust. You may have never heard of it, but in a matter of days, this fast-moving, silent-killing plant disease can completely annihilate a critical wheat farm in Ethiopia. Wheat rust’s newest nemeses? A legion of volunteer superheroes in the Data for Good movement. When Jake Porway, Founder and Executive
Analytics Experience 2016 featured more than 100 breakout sessions and talks covering numerous topics in big data. You can watch many of those talks from our Analytics Experience 2016 video portal, where select keynote and session talks are archived. To give you a taste of the content you'll find there, here’s a
Last week I showed how to compute nearest-neighbor distances for a set of numerical observations. Nearest-neighbor distances are used in many statistical computations, including the analysis of spatial point patterns. This article describes how the distribution of nearest-neighbor distances can help you determine whether spatial data are uniformly distributed or
I've created several hundred SAS graphs over the years. I was just musing to myself this morning how nicely Google lets me peruse through images of my graphs. And I thought some of you might also like to know how to do that... Most of you know how to search for keywords
.@philsimon on the need to adopt agile methodologies for data prep and analytics.
Historically, generations could expect to experience one – maybe at best – major technology disruption or transformation in their lifetime. That’s simply not the case today. Today it is more difficult than ever before to know what will transform the technology landscape in the next month or the next year.
“What we are experiencing from analytics today is nothing short of a revolution,” said CEO Jim Goodnight, who spoke at Analytics Experience 2016 and set the stage for the conference’s executive panel. “Right now, my primary mission is to ensure people understand the limitless possibilities that lie before us, given
In Part 1 of this two-part series, I defined data preparation and data wrangling, then raised some questions about requirements gathering in a governed environment (i.e., ODS and/or data warehouse). Now – all of us very-managed people are looking at the horizon, and we see the data lake. How do
Who says machine learning can't be fun? A crew of us from SAS went to San Francisco for the recent KDD conference, which bills itself as "a premier interdisciplinary conference, [which]brings together researchers and practitioners from data science, data mining, knowledge discovery, large-scale data analytics, and big data." We brought
Deutschland ist beliebt bei Auswanderern. Was von Menschen aus anderen Ländern, die hier wohnen und arbeiten, positiv hervorgehoben wird, ist laut einem aktuellen Report unter anderem die Gesundheitsversorgung. Und diese Qualität hat ihren Preis. Die Pro-Kopf-Ausgaben im Gesundheitswesen steigen mehr oder weniger seit Jahren kontinuierlich. Doch gibt es Verbündete gegen
You've seen the QR codes that you can just scan in with your smartphone's camera, rather than writing down a web URL or other information, right? But do you know how to create your own QR code? Here's an easy way to create them, using SAS... You're probably familiar with
