They say age is a relative thing. With this graph, you can tell how old (or young) you are, relative to everyone else. (I'll let you decide whether this is a good thing, or a bad thing, hahaha!) Nathan Yau recently posted a graph on flowingdata.com that allows you to
Last week I blogged about how to draw the Cantor function in SAS. The Cantor function is used in mathematics as a pathological example of a function that is constant almost everywhere yet somehow manages to "climb upwards," thus earning the nickname "the devil's staircase." The Cantor function has three
Data monetisation is a hot topic these days. Especially for people like me watching the movements of early adopters – companies who are using data to create new revenue streams or even create new businesses to capture those revenue streams. DataStreamX is a notable start-up whose sole business is cashing
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of the Summer Issue of Foresight Clarity and effectiveness of communication are key to success – so says a recent survey by the National Association of Business Economists (NABE), which reported that industry leaders and hiring managers considered communication skills to be the single most important
Paul Goodwin is Professor Emeritus of Management Science at University of Bath, and one of the speakers at this fall's Foresight Practitioner Conference (October 5-6 in Raleigh, NC). His topic will be "Use and Abuse of Judgmental Overrides to Statistical Forecasts"-- an area in which he has contributed much of
We live in a complex world that overflows with information. As human beings, we are very good at navigating this maze, where different types of input hit us from every possible direction. Without really thinking about it, we take in the inputs, evaluate the new information, combine it with our
Auditability and data quality are two of the most important demands on a data warehouse. Why? Because reliable data processes ensure the accuracy of your analytical applications and statistical reports. Using a standard data model enhances auditability and data quality of your data warehouse implementation for business analytics.
It’s clear from the minute you step into Accenture’s Digital Innovation Center (Future Camp) in Kronberg, Germany, that you're stepping into the future of innovation. The writing is literally on the walls, and everything you need to inspire big ideas – from brightly colored furniture to racks and racks of gadgets
Data scientists are familiar with prototyping - we do this as part of a well-understood process to arrive at the optimum solution. But prototyping is more than about perfecting the math; it should also be about testing interpretability of the results. This need comes into stark prominence when you start
Let’s go back to 1976 for a moment. Did you know that was the year Muhammad Ali introduced a line of beauty products called “Knock Out?” And the hottest merchandise, including t-shirts, posters and even beanbags sported the character Arthur Fonzarelli (The Fonz) of TV’s “Happy Days.” But there was something
Throughout my 10 years at a leading direct marketing and CRM agency, a chief issue we solved for our clients was what we affectionately referred to as a spaghetti junction. It’s a nickname often given to a massively intertwined road traffic interchange that resembles a plate of spaghetti, like this
At some point, your business or IT leaders will decide – enough is enough; we can't live with the performance, functionality or cost of the current application landscape. Perhaps your financial services employer wants to offer mobile services, but building modern apps via the old mainframe architecture is impractical and a replacement
I was a freshman in college the first time I saw the Cantor middle-thirds set and the related Cantor "Devil's staircase" function. (Shown at left.) These constructions expanded my mind and led me to study fractals, real analysis, topology, and other mathematical areas. The Cantor function and the Cantor middle-thirds
Let's continue now to Nikolaos Kourentzes' blog post on How to choose a forecast for your time series. Using a Validation Sample Nikos first discusses the fairly common approach of using a validation or "hold out" sample. The idea is to build your model based on a subset of the
Nikolaos Kourentzes is Associate Professor at Lancaster University, and a member of the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting. In addition to having a great head of hair for a forecasting professor, Nikos has a great head for explaining fundamental forecasting concepts. In his recent blog post on How to choose a
Starting in 2018, IFRS 9 will require banks around the world to change their processes for accounting of credit risk. This new impairment standard will move banks from the backward looking incurred loss model into a forward looking Expected Credit Loss (ECL) modelling approach. When talking with banks around the
With the recent vote for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union being all over the news, I was a bit embarrassed to realize I didn't know exactly what areas are (and aren't) considered part of the UK. After a few Google searches, I found the following map on the
Over the last ten years, utilities around the world have have invested billions of dollars in the Internet of Things (IoT). Better known as smart grid and smart meter initiatives, this massive intelligent infrastructure is moving utilities into a future that’s beginning to look radically different from the century-old business model
Would you like to see the latest features of SAS Enterprise Guide in action? Of course you would! That's why it's well worth the 12 minutes of your time to watch this video from SAS Global Forum 2016. In the video, Casey Smith (SAS' R&D manager of the SAS Enterprise
More and more organizations are considering the use of maturing scalable computing environments like Hadoop as part of their enterprise data management, processing and analytics infrastructure. But there's a significant difference between the evaluation phase of technology adoption and its subsequent production phase. This seems apparent in terms of how organizations are
Das „Recht auf Vergessen“ hat nichts mit der Demenzerkrankung Alzheimer tun und betrifft auch nicht nur Personen im fortgeschrittenen Alter. Das „Recht auf Vergessen“ und „Portabilität“ bezeichnen Rechte im Rahmen der neuen europäischen Datenschutzverordnung, die nach vier Jahren Arbeit die nun doch schon 20 Jahren alte Verordnung ablöst, und die
'Tis a gift to be simple. -- Shaker hymn In June 2015 I published a short article for Significance, a magazine that features statistical and data-related articles that are of general interest to a wide a range of scientists. The title of my article is "In Praise of Simple Graphics."
One thing that we have a lot of at SAS: installations of SAS software that we can run. I have SAS for Windows on my laptop, and I have access to many centralized instances of SAS that run on Linux and Windows servers. (I also have access to mainframe SAS,
For banks across Asia and Europe, a new accounting standard is of increasing importance – IFRS 9. With the first IFRS 9 reporting deadline looming January 1, 2018, banks are trying to understand what they need to do to be ready. At its core, the IFRS 9 accounting standard introduces
When I joined SAS nearly 32 years ago, I didn’t set out to be its first Chief Customer Officer (CCO). I made it here by setting small goals for myself over the years, sharing those goals and attaining them step by step. It’s been a lot like training for a
Cities must work with companies, universities, other cities and organizations to truly realize the Smart Cities vision. This was a consistent message at last week’s Smart Cities Innovation Summit, where leaders from more than 200 cities met with technology and service providers and academics to talk about new innovations that
Let's create a souped-up SAS map that can track Zika-carrying mosquitoes down to the county level, in the US! A few months ago, I wrote a blog post with a world map of documented locations of the Aedes mosquitoes that could carry the Zika virus. The world map showed a high concentration
For those of us who haven’t been hermits stuck in a remote section of Middle Earth, The Lord of the Rings book and movie series brought to our awareness the mythical powers of The One Ring: An object with a sinister inscription that reads “One Ring to Rule Them All.”
The “big” part of big data is about enabling insights that were previously indiscernible. It's about uncovering small differences that make a big difference in domains as widespread as health care, public health, marketing and business process optimization, law enforcement and cybersecurity – and even the detection of new subatomic particles.
Optimization for machine learning is essential to ensure that data mining models can learn from training data in order to generalize to future test data. Data mining models can have millions of parameters that depend on the training data and, in general, have no analytic definition. In such cases, effective models
