This guest post was written by Andy Pulkstenis, Director of Advanced Analytics for State Farm Insurance. He leads a team of advanced analytics professionals providing statistical analysis and predictive modeling support for the enterprise across a variety of business units. His background includes more than a decade of experience improving
If not for probability theory, urns would appear only in funeral homes and anthologies of British poetry. But in probability and statistics, urns are ever present and contain colored balls. The removal and inspection of colored balls from an urn is a classic way to demonstrate probability, sampling, variation, and
As a youngster in the 70s and 80s, Star Trek inspired my imagination and fostered a great love for science, technology and reading. (See the embedded Star Trek infographic for some interesting factoids – did you know that there were 28 crew member deaths by those wearing red shirts?) Captain Kirk and the
As we continue our celebration of 25 years of SAS Press, I thought I’d share 25 reasons why you should write a book with us and become a SAS Press author. It’s not all work; we also have fun through this enriching journey from idea to print! Here’s our top
When I was discussing decision making and analytics with a colleague, he recommended I read the book Your Brain at Work by David Rock. I took his advice because I wanted to find out how the brain processes information and how it might relate to analytics. Rock (you gotta love that name) explains the importance of the
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don't know which half.” ~ John Wanamaker, U.S. department store magnate and merchandising / advertising pioneer. I’m not going to claim that I can pinpoint exactly which half of your marketing dollars are wasted in the space
Update 02Dec2016: Beginning with SAS 9.4 Maintenance 4, there is now a JSON libname engine. Read this new article to learn more -- you might prefer it to using DS2 for this task! Thanks to the proliferation of cloud services and REST-based APIs, SAS users have been making use of
I get several requests and recommendations for analyzing sports data. I'm not a big sports fan ... but when did I ever let that stop me! When I find interesting data, I like to graph it! Before we get into the nitty-gritty data analysis, here is a picture of my friend Jennifer's daughter
Why are so many companies across a diverse set of industries investing in and around the Internet of Things? Everywhere I go, every blog I read … I sound like my favorite band from the 80s: the Internet of Things is watching me. In reality, it’s the reverse: I'm seeing
You've had a long day. You've implemented a custom algorithm in the SAS/IML language. But before you go home, you want to generate some matrices and test your program. If you are like me, you prefer a short statement—one line would be best. However, you also want the flexibility to
I routinely speak with executives who tell me that the ability to “sell” analytical results is just as important as producing them. In this post I will share some of what I have learned in several years of presenting complicated analytical results to audiences, both technical and lay. Some of
What is your first reaction to this question: “How would you like to take an exam today?” If you are like most people, you probably responded in a not so positive way. Maybe your brow furrowed, you physically leaned away from your computer (and this article), or your stomach knotted
Healthcare IT News recently published an article on 18 health technologies poised for big growth, a list culled from a HIMSS database. The database is used to track an extensive list of technology products that have seen growth of 4-10 percent since 2010, but have not yet reached a 70
Healthcare IT News recently published an article on 18 health technologies poised for big growth, a list culled from a HIMSS database. The database is used to track an extensive list of technology products that have seen growth of 4-10 percent since 2010, but have not yet reached a 70
We're wrapping up our “Meet the Team” blog series with SAS Solutions Architect Keith Renison. I was introduced to Keith earlier this year and was immediately impressed with his knowledge of advanced analytics and his enthusiasm for technology. He describes himself best: “I’m a combination of a data visualization snob
New York City is a pioneer in use of technology in many ways. For instance, the work of the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics has been cited repeatedly as an example of smart city innovation. But the innovation doesn’t stop there. Two projects that used SAS data visualization and data
It’s been an amazing journey with Hadoop. As we discussed in an earlier blog, Hadoop is informing the basis of a comprehensive data enterprise platform that can power an ecosystem of analytic applications to uncover rich insights on large sets of data. With YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator) as its
In October I will be at the Analytics 2015 conference in Las Vegas. I’ve never been to Las Vegas before. People tell me that if you are better than average in forecasting where a small ball will end up after it’s been spinning for a while in a dish with
The need for fast and easy access to high-powered analytics has never been greater than it is today. Fortunately, cloud processing still holds the promise of making analytics more transparent and ubiquitous than ever before. Yet, a significant number of challenges still exist that prevent more widespread adoption of cloud
.@philsimon on the new role of IT.
My blog posts focus on visual data analysis, and many of them use geographical maps. Therefore I hope you will have fun with a quick geography quiz, which I created using SAS/Graph ... And what, you might
Occasionally a SAS statistical programmer will ask me, "How can I construct a large correlation matrix?" Often they are simulating data with SAS or developing a matrix algorithm that involves a correlation matrix. Typically they want a correlation matrix that is too large to input by hand, such as a
A week from today, we'll be in New York City for Strata + Hadoop World, where we’ll kick things off at the Opening Reception. Be sure to stop by booth 543 to meet the team IRL (in real life)! They are excited about the event and eager to talk with attendees.
A new version of SAS® Text Miner and SAS® High-Performance Text Mining has recently been made available and I want to demonstrate some of the performance improvements that can be gained with this release. I’ll use a topic analysis that discovers the main themes in a document collection and consists
It’s rather appropriate that the rock band Europe recorded the hit “The Final Countdown”, because today, September 22nd, represents 100 days until the much anticipated (and delayed) European insurance legislation Solvency II will come into effect on January 1st 2016. Designed to introduce a harmonized, EU-wide insurance regulation, Solvency II
At California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo the Statistics Department offers two courses on preparation for the Base SAS Certification and Advanced SAS Certification exams, respectively. Each of these courses is 10 weeks long and the topics covered follow the content offered in the certification guides offered by SAS.
These days many devices (such as smart phone apps, Fitbits, Apple watches, dog tracking collars, car gps, hiking gps, teen/car trackers, etc) can track your location, and provide you with standard/canned ways to analyze the data. This blog post shows how I created a custom SAS map of the tracking
.@philsimon on the new challenges of an old problem.
A Vermont Department of Children Families (DCF) worker was murdered last month. The lead suspect is the mother of a child that was previously removed from her care and placed in foster care. This tragedy illustrates the challenges and risks that workers have in the field of serving at risk
Dear Rick, I have a data set with 1,001 numerical variables. One variable is the response, the others are explanatory variable. How can I read the 1,000 explanatory variables into an IML matrix without typing every name? That's a good question. You need to be able to perform two sub-tasks:
