Higher education is a buyer’s market today, with the student being the buyer, according to Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute. And don’t universities know it. Not only are they dealing with tuition fee caps, but they face mounting competition from other educational institutions. There are many UK
When I talk with more analytically savvy users of SAS® Text Miner or SAS® Contextual Analysis, I inevitably get asked questions about why SAS uses a completely different approach to topic generation than anybody else and why should they trust the approach SAS adopts? These are good questions. I first
I don’t know about you, but I'm asked every day where some type of data lives in our enterprise. I keep thinking that we have not done a good job of helping people learn to help themselves! A few things I have learned about corporate data assets are: The data
How does SAS integrate with Hadoop? That's a question we often hear from people new to SAS who want to learn more about using SAS with Hadoop. At Strata + Hadoop World earlier this month, we were able to not only talk to attendees to answer their questions -- we were able to show
The Rule of Three is a writing principle that suggests that things that come in threes are inherently funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things – Wikipedia. 3 Ps of success, Blind Mice, Little Pigs, Stooges, Musketeers, The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, rings, pairs
Jim Harris explains why it's especially important to assess the quality of metadata when it comes to big data.
How do you simulate a contingency table that has a specified row and column sum? Last week I showed how to simulate a random 2 x 2 contingency table when the marginal frequencies are specified. This article generalizes to random r x c frequency tables (also called cross-tabulations) that have the same marginal row
In my first post of the analytics in real life blog series, we heard four higher education customers discuss using SAS and why they chose SAS. Today we will hear the following three customers share the positive impact of using SAS and analytics for their users and institution. Karl Konsdorf, Acting
My last post, Pitching analytics: recommendations on how to sell your story, discussed the steps I consider when winding up for an analytics pitch. In part 2 of this series I share the tips and tricks I have acquired for throwing strikes for during your analytics pitch. Like everyone, sometimes
It's that time of year again - time to choose what Halloween candy to buy for the trick-or-treaters! This is always a tough decision that has me angsting in the candy aisle. And if selecting the perfect candy wasn't enough pressure, my city (Cary, NC) was recently recognized as #1 on
You’ve read their books. You’ve probably even met them at conferences. But now, we’re revealing another side of our beloved SAS authors in this list of fun facts. Prepare to be surprised. Hint – one of the authors swims with sharks. Tricia Aanderud Tricia has over 100 jokes memorized -
With Big Data, there are far more technical questions than answers.
A recent question posted on a discussion forum discussed storing the strictly upper-triangular portion of a correlation matrix. Suppose that you have a correlation matrix like the following: proc iml; corr = {1.0 0.6 0.5 0.4, 0.6 1.0 0.3 0.2, 0.5 0.3 1.0 0.1, 0.4 0.2 0.1 1.0}; Every correlation
Pink and blue. These colors are often synonymous with gender. In fact, when I was pregnant 16 years ago, we had no idea of our baby’s sex. At the shower, we received lots of blue, green and yellow clothing, but no pink. It’s interesting how blue can represent both male
All of us in the retail and wholesale industry, regardless of role, are responsible for the same objectives: Increase customer satisfaction, inventory productivity, and profitability by way of localization and omni strategies. We've learned that our best strategies sometimes fall short; we spend significant effort analyzing, only to achieve marginal results. Many of
No one knows for sure who coined the term Big Data. Despite etymological studies, we are still no closer to attributing provenance to any one person, or indeed any one period. Some say the term was coined in the '80s, others believe the '90s – and many are convinced the term originated
More and more of my friends seem to be eating less and less meat, for various reasons (such as religious, health, social conscience, weight loss, personal preference, cost savings, etc). So I thought I would put together a graph to help them find alternate sources of protein. While searching for
In today’s brave new technological world, most of us live cocooned in thermo-regulated cars and buildings. Our food and drink is on tap, and we experience little inconvenience beyond death and taxes. It’s easy to forget that life as we know it would come to an abrupt halt without the
The Internet of Things, that glorious futurescape in which billions of connected devices take much of the work and tedium out of daily living. As human beings, we’re addicted to our stuff and what it does for us. So a world in which most of our cell phones and other
Jim Harris discusses perspectives on the question of how much quality big data really needs.
When modeling and simulating data, it is important to be able to articulate the real-life statistical process that generates the data. Suppose a friend says to you, "I want to simulate two random correlated variables, X and Y." Usually this means that he wants data generated from a multivariate distribution,
Have you been in your attic lately? Or maybe cleaned out that closet that all of your “stuff” seems to gravitate to? Sure, mostly you’ll just find old junk that is no longer useful or purely nostalgic, but every once in a while you come across those long lost treasures
So you think you know how to forecast? Now is your chance to prove it, by participating in a probabilistic load forecasting competition run by my friend (and former SAS colleague), Dr. Tao Hong. Currently a professor at UNC Charlotte and director of the Big Data Energy Analytics Laboratory (BigDEAL),
Big data, by which most people mean Big Volume, doesn’t get you very far just by itself, but with the addition of Big Variety and analytics, now you’re talking. In fact, most organizations who are making headway into capitalizing on their data assets now refer to the process as "big
Do you ever stop and think about why it’s so hard to get really great customer service? As consumers, most of us are making transactions all day long, but it’s rare that someone actually surprises or delights us. More often, we rack up negative experiences. Think of what it’s like
Rick Wicklin created a nice example of using the SURFACEPLOTPARM statement to create a surface plot in SAS. As I read it, the question that immediately came to mind was: can I use this to create the famous SAS cowboy hat? The "cowboy hat" is a highly distributed example of
Customer intelligence will help an insurance company deepen its customer insights, choreograph its customer interactions and continuously improve its marketing performance. Unfortunately for all the progress made in recent years on customer relationship management and getting to know customers better, insurance companies are still not focusing on customers as much
Big data is here to stay, whether we like it or not. Regardless of how you feel about it, it can help solve problems which simply could not be addressed without big data and advanced analytics. One area in which big data and analytics can provide huge benefits is the medical arena. In a recent
This article shows how to visualize a surface in SAS. You can use the SURFACEPLOTPARM statement in the Graph Template Language (GTL) to create a surface plot. But don't worry, you don't need to know anything about GTL: just copy the code in this article and replace the names of
Imagine you're an investigator sorting through 6,000 mug shots taken at different jails around the state. You are tasked with finding all the mug shots of a high-profile con artist who has been arrested in multiple cities using a number of different aliases over the last five years. How can
