“And the weather yesterday was a sunny 18oC with warm spells in the south and showers in the north. This is similar to the pattern we saw last Thursday.” Imagine if the weather forecast only restated what happened in the past -- would we bother waiting until the end of
A study from MONEY and Payscale.com found SAS analytics skills to be most valuable.
Yesterday a frustrated SAS user complained on Twitter. He's working with a database that stores an ID field as a big long number (perhaps using the database BIGINT type), and SAS can't display a number greater than 15 digits. Well, it's actually 16 digits, depending on the value: %put Biggest
The numbers are daunting. More than 40 million Americans have their identities stolen each year. Credit card companies lose more than $200 billion annually due to fraud. Cybercrime-related losses exceed $3 million per claim for large companies. If you’re like me, those stats are enough to give pause. To fuel the concern,
How bad was the recent recession on the Las Vegas housing market, and what lingering side effects are still being felt? If you don't know squat about real estate housing markets, then this blog post is for you! It takes a simple graphical look at some data that helps explain
Using a standardized data model is an essential condition to achieve data governance in an enterprise. A standard data model supports data governance processes by implementing industry standards wherever possible: standards for contract and claims representation, mapping of data content with standard definitions (glossary function), use of code attributes
.@philsimon on the collision between the two.
I was eleven years old when I first saw Newton's method. No, I didn't go to a school for geniuses. I didn't even know it was Newton's method until decades later. However, in sixth grade I learned an iterative algorithm that taught me (almost) everything I need to know about
As a parent of children who love books, I can tell you that there is something humorous about taking a first name, adding a "Mc" and then a rhyming surname to make up a brand new character name. My daughters always loved to read the adventures of Harry Mclary from
The pharmaceutical industry will undergo significant changes this summer. A set of standards for the identification of medicinal products (IDMP) from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) will take effect in July, requiring the whole industry to apply the terminologies released by EMA. The changes have raised many concerns regarding how
Master data management (MDM) provides methods for unifying data about important entities (such as “customer” or “product”) that are managed within independent systems. In most cases, there is some kind of customer data integration requirement for downstream reporting, and analysis for some specific business objective – such as customer profiling for
When I was in the sixth grade, I learned an iterative procedure for computing square roots by hand. Yes, I said by hand. Scientific calculators with a square root key were not yet widely available, so I and previous generations of children suffered through learning to calculate square roots by
What's the most common data reporting mechanism? Is it web-based reporting? PDFs? How about spreadsheets? Maybe, but in my experience many reports are delivered using a less-scalable and transient mechanism: e-mail. I'm a data steward at SAS. Specifically, I look after the operational data around our blogging program and our
It was John Allen Paulos who said, “Data, data everywhere, but not a thought to think.” That rings true more than ever before. Companies are struggling with the deluge of data coming at them from multiple channels. But traditional data channels are just the beginning. Companies also are facing an
The buzz about the Internet of Things (IoT) combined with the insights derived from analytics appears to be hotter than ever. What's interesting to me is how many people go about their lives without knowing what the IoT is and how they're already benefitting from it (or how their jobs
I've spent much of my career managing the quality of data after it was moved from its sources to a central location, such as an enterprise data warehouse. Nowadays not only do we have a lot more data – but a lot of it is in motion. One of the
In my previous post, I wrote about the Quick Pulse survey of leaders of health care institutions and the vital role data and analytics has in patient care and engagement. In this post, I'll tell you what the survey had to say about the progress these leaders believe they are
In this blog post I explore some of the open data police incident reports for Raleigh and Cary, while showing you the easy way to handle various types of CSV files. In recent years, many cities have set up open data websites, to share various kinds of data about their city.
.@philsimon asks some fundamental questions about taking the next step with #bigdata.
Research indicates that IoT and Machine Learning are more valuable to utilities when used in combination but there are hurdles to overcome first. Machine learning and IoT will enable utilities to better realize the next generation of the power grid: a distributed system with power flows among millions of things
“All for one and one for all” is best known as the motto from “The Three Musketeers”, but this phrase could easily sum up the growing trend in social brokers. With advanced analytical techniques like generalized linear modeling insurance companies have created more granular pricing structures. But despite the assertions
Optimization is a primary tool of computational statistics. SAS/IML software provides a suite of nonlinear optimizers that makes it easy to find an optimum for a user-defined objective function. You can perform unconstrained optimization, or define linear or nonlinear constraints for constrained optimization. Over the years I have seen many
In my previous post, Jedi SAS Tricks - Make This a Button in Base SAS I demonstrated running a SAS program from a tool bar button in the SAS Windowing environment. The program we execute is the macro from a previous post, Jedi SAS Tricks: The DATA to DATA Step
As everyone in the financial industry knows, CCAR (comprehensive capital analysis and review) was set up as a capital adequacy assessment for the major US banks. Through several years of practice and feedback, CCAR has evolved into a comprehensive stress testing exercise -- and in doing so, created a new
In my previous post I discussed the practice of putting data quality processes as close to data sources as possible. Historically this meant data quality happened during data integration in preparation for loading quality data into an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) or a master data management (MDM) hub. Nowadays, however, there’s a lot of
Last week I analyzed 12 million records of taxi cab transactions in New York City. As part of that analysis, I used a DATA step view to create a new variable, which was the ratio of the tip amount to the fare amount. A novice SAS programmer told me that
The current rate of workforce change is unprecedented. Each new generation of working professionals is emerging more rapidly than the one before, with increasingly advanced expectations of their employers. The latest cohort is Generation Z, typically defined as those born after 1998. This group is fresh-faced, independent and extremely pragmatic.
Not everything that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. At this year’s SAS Global Forum 2016, so many exciting things happened that I have to share some highlights. From the use of analytics in college administration to the teaching of analytics in the classroom, the range of information presented was quite
We had just completed a four-week data quality assessment of an inside plant installation. It wasn't looking good. There were huge gaps in the data, particularly when we cross-referenced systems together. In theory, each system was meant to hold identical information of the plant equipment. But when we consolidated the
In 1969, a human walked on the moon. I remember my parents waking me in the wee hours to watch (albeit bleary eyed) the grainy images on our black and white television as Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. Heady stuff then and now. In another world-altering advancement,
