Are you afraid that if you take a ride in a taxi, you might get "taken for a ride"? If trying to figure out the reasonable price of a taxi is a bit voodoo/black-box to you, here is a SAS data analysis of over 12 million NYC Yellow Cab rides, that
Some people think motorcycle racing is a sport for thrill seekers and adrenaline junkies. So you might be surprised to hear that after many years of racing, I’ve found it to be a contemplative activity more related to precision and prediction than reckless abandon. In motorcycle racing, the driver has
Across the globe, governments are losing billions in revenues to organised VAT fraud. The most recent VAT Gap study published by the European Commission estimates that EU countries lost an estimated €168 billion in VAT revenues in 2013. That's equivalent to 15.2% of the total expected VAT revenue from the
Was zeichnet ein erfolgreiches Unternehmen aus? Entscheidender Indikator für den Erfolg ist der Umsatz und der daraus resultierende Gewinn des laufenden Geschäftsjahres. Was auf der einen Seite hart erarbeitet wird, geht allerdings auf der anderen Seite oft leichtfertig verloren. So büßen viele Unternehmen laut Analystenstudien etwa acht Prozent ihres Gewinns
Tax preparation software has encouraged the gamification of tax evasion, making it tantalizingly simple to bump up the value of a tax refund. This is alarming, but it's easy to see how we got here. I love classic video games. When I was a kid, Atari made the best games, but hard
Just like my hero Mike Rowe on the Dirty Jobs TV show, I'm finally diving into an area involving water quality ... and poop! Let's take a graphical look at just how clean (or dirty) the water is, at the lake where my Raleigh Dragon Boat Club practices... Before we get
Insurance is a tough marketplace, but in many respects reinsurance is tougher! Today, the reinsurance industry is faced with an unprecedented number of challenges especially with what appears to be an increasing frequency and severity of man-made and natural catastrophes. To combat these challenges, reinsurers are turning to technology for
I saw an interesting mathematical result in Wired magazine. The original article was about mathematical research into prime numbers, but the article included the following tantalizing fact: If Alice tosses a [fair]coin until she sees a head followed by a tail, and Bob tosses a coin until he sees two
Welcome to the dreaded week when procrastinators embrace their fates as responsible taxpayers. While you and I may be paying our taxes, to no surprise, as much as $2 trillion in the underground economy will go unreported this year in the U.S. While that number may seem shocking, and the percentage is higher than
Throughout my long career of building and implementing data quality processes, I've consistently been told that data quality could not be implemented within data sources, because doing so would disrupt production systems. Therefore, source data was often copied to a central location – a staging area – where it was cleansed, transformed, unduplicated, restructured
The SG procedures in SAS use aesthetically pleasing default colors, shapes, and styles, but sometimes it is necessary to override the default attributes. The MARKERATTRS= option enables you to override the default colors, symbols, and sizes of markers in scatter plots and other graphs. Similarly, the LINEATTRS= option enables you
Recently a user was working with the HBAR statement with cluster groups with SG procedures. User wanted to see the group values on the axis. SGPLOT does not display multi level axes as these are shared with different plot types. However, with SGPLOT, there is often a way to get
Tax fraud doesn’t just steal money from taxpayers, it can strip people of their livelihoods and reputations. When a manager in a tax agency’s property tax division stole nearly $50M in property tax refunds, the media and external auditors asked: “How did no one notice this?” The woman started small,
If you happen to be a SAS credential holder, like most candidates, you have invested a lot of time and effort in earning your SAS certification. Wouldn’t it be great if you could broadcast and manage verifiable proof of your achievement where you want and when you want? That’s where
How do universities predict which students will enroll? And how do they determine what actions recruitment officers should take to entice students to pick their university? These were two of the key questions tackled by Lisa Moore, Data Scientist at University of Oklahoma, during her presentation at The Texas Association
In my first blog article I explained that many insurance companies have implemented a standard data model as base for their business analytics data warehouse (DWH) solutions. But why should a standard data model be more appropriate than an individual one designed especially for a certain insurance company?
A soccer fairy tale Imagine it's Soccer Saturday. You've got 10 kids and 10 loads of laundry – along with buried soccer jerseys – that you need to clean before the games begin. Oh, and you have two hours to do this. Fear not! You are a member of an advanced HOA
Heute im Interview: Jan-Ole Romann von SAS befragt Jürgen Fritz (Mitglied der Geschäftsleitung bei SAS). Sie sprechen darüber, welche thematischen Highlights die Besucher beim anstehenden SAS Forum am 28. April in Bonn erwarten.
When you’re making a report, how do you choose which procedure to use? The answer is – it depends. It depends on: whether you are doing an ad hoc analysis or creating a final report that many people will see whether you will run statistical tests with your data or
I know what you're thinking: two "Boaty McBoatface" articles within two weeks? And we're past April Fool's Day? But since I posted my original analysis about the "Name our ship" phenomenon that's happening in the UK right now, a new contender has appeared: Poppy-Mai. The cause of Poppy-Mai, a critically
As I explained in Part 1 of this series, spelling my name wrong does bother me! However, life changes quickly at health insurance, healthcare and pharmaceutical companies. That said, taking unintegrated or cleansed data and propagating it to Hadoop may only help one issue. That would be the issue of getting the data
For thousands of years, the human experience has been recorded by storytellers. Stories tell the tale of our lives: beginning, middle and end. Stories document the triumphs and tragedies of heroes and villains and everything in between. Human beings are storytellers -- it's a trait as uniquely human as an
Last week I showed how to generate random points uniformly inside a 2-d circular region. That article showed that the distance of a point to the circle's center cannot be distributed uniformly. Instead, you should use the square root of a uniform variate to generate 2-D distances to the origin.
With the recent changes to federal education policy, I wanted to learn more so I interviewed Emily Baranello, Vice President SAS Education Practice and Susan Gates, SAS Special Advisor on Education. In part 1 of the interview, they were helpful in explaining the new policies, impact, opportunities and challenges for
While you're at SAS Global Forum (or any conference) in Las Vegas, you might have a bit of spare time to do some sightseeing. Therefore I've put together a list & map of interesting things you might want to experience! Below is a snapshot of my map - click it
"I've seen the future of data science, and it is filled with estrogen!" This was the opening remark at a recent talk I heard. If only I'd seen that vision of the future when I was in college. You see, I’ve always loved math (and still do). My first calculus
Most regular readers may have already noticed the release of my new book "Clinical Graphs using SAS", as indicated by the icon of the book cover and the link to the SAS Press page under the "About this blog" section on the right. This book is a result of the various
I've got scale on my mind! While speeding down the rails from Brussels to Paris on the TGV (the sleek, high-speed train), the scale of speed is breathtaking. In previous generations, going from Brussels to Paris for a single-day meeting would have inevitably involved a plane, with check-ins, security, travel
With tax week quickly approaching, tax agencies have been issuing press releases alerting the public they’re holding tax refunds for review longer than in years past. This is a departure for tax agencies. Tax agencies have traditionally lived and died by refund cycle time. Refund cycle time, or getting refunds
While it’s obvious that chickens hatch from eggs that were laid by other chickens, what’s less obvious is which came first – the chicken or the egg? This classic conundrum has long puzzled non-scientists and scientists alike. There are almost as many people on Team Chicken as there are on Team
