Last week, SAS released the 14.1 version of its analytics products, which are shipped as part of the third maintenance release of 9.4. If you run SAS/IML programs from a 64-bit Windows PC, you might be interested to know that you can now create matrices with about 231 ≈ 2
Looking at the top 100 organizations in the world, have you ever wondered which ones we’d really miss if they were to disappear? Give it a try. I bet you don’t choose the ones with the highest profits. You probably make your picks based on meaning. You probably chose the
Oh, how times have changed during my 20-plus years in the insurance industry. Data wasn’t a word we used much back in the 80s and 90s, unless of course you worked in those arcane and mysterious IT data centres. Even amidst the computerisation of the insurance industry in the 80s, many
Oh, how times have changed during my 20-plus years in the insurance industry. Data wasn’t a word we used much back in the 80s and 90s, unless of course you worked in those arcane and mysterious IT data centres. Even amidst the computerisation of the insurance industry in the 80s, many
There's been quite a bit of controversy about the number of undocumented immigrants in the US lately - for example, Ann Coulter claims that number is 30 million, whereas others claim it's about 11 million (readers of my blog are data-savvy, and would dig into the details of such claims,
In my previous blog post, I discussed the benefits of a Statewide Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) and shared a SAS book on the subject: Implement, Improve and Expand Your Statewide Longitudinal Data System by Armistead W Sapp III and Jamie McQuiggan. Today, I'm sharing a conversation I had with one of the book’s authors,
I returned to work from a 2+ week vacation this morning. When I fired up SAS Enterprise Guide (as I do each work day and occasionally on weekends), I was greeted with this message: As a SAS insider, I knew this was coming. It's a new feature that was added
I recently read an argument by Andrew Wheeler for using a logarithmic axis for plotting odds ratios. I found his argument convincing. Accordingly, this blog post shows how to create an odds ratio plot in SAS where the ratio axis is displayed on a log scale. Thanks to Bob Derr
I saw the dress photo as blue & black. If you're a female, even if we perceived the exact same color, you might might not have said 'blue & black'. That's because women have a larger color vocabulary than men, and you might have elaborated on exactly which blue and
Black or White Box? Bei der Bewertung der Güte von Modellen im Rahmen von Predictive Modeling liegt der Fokus heute häufig auf der Prognosegenauigkeit. Mit anderen Wort: Wie gut ist das jeweils gewählte Modell in der Lage, das tatsächlich eingetretene interessierende Ereignis oder den Wert der Zielvariablen vorzusagen. Verschiedene Gütekriterien
SAS recently held the Detroit Automotive Analytics Executive Forum to bring together leaders from the Industry. We heard from an experienced group of leaders on the future of the automotive industry, best practices for analytics success, innovative retail analytics, customer experience analytics, the connected vehicle, and competing on analytics. Following
We are all modelers. Whenever you plan, you are building a model. Whenever you imagine, you are building a model. When you create, write, paint or speak, you first build in your head a model of what you want to accomplish, and then fill in the details with words, movements
This tip is from Heath Rushing, coauthor of Design and Analysis of Experiments by Douglas Montgomery: A Supplement for Using JMP®. After a recent design of experiments (DOE) course, a student asked about experiments with dependent factors. Throughout the two days of training, we spent considerable time designing experiments to
In a complicated, fast-paced and connected world, you don’t succeed alone. SAS and Cloudera have a successful partnership that dates back several years. Our products are complementary and provide significant quantifiable value to customers who run them on the same cluster. Add Intel to the mix and you have a trio
July has been an exciting month for me. Not only because of the historic Tour de France this year... but even more because this month the new offering SAS Factory Miner was officially released! With SAS Factory Miner you can run predictive models in an automated model tournament environment to
Base SAS contains many functions for processing strings, and you can call these functions from within a SAS/IML program. However, sometimes a SAS/IML programmer needs to process a vector of strings. No problem! You can call most Base SAS functions with a vector of parameters. I have previously written about
You have to be "in it to win it" as they say. This is becoming the case for many organisations that need to start using data to make better, evidence-based business decisions. Today, using analytics is not so much a data lottery as a data necessity. Some businesses may not
The Raleigh News & Observer published a front-page article about the effect of wealth and poverty on high school athletics in North Carolina. In particular, the article concluded that "high schools with a high percentage of poor students rarely win titles in the so-called country club sports—tennis, golf and swimming—and
In December, Saint Peter’s University grants Master’s degrees to its inaugural class of data scientists. 36 students are enrolled in this program, and eight are set to graduate. As reported this year by Bloomberg, career opportunities for analytics talent are excellent. Saint Peter’s is the latest to collaborate with SAS to offer such a program.
My colleague Robert Allison finds the most interesting data sets to visualize! Yesterday he posted a visualization of toothless seniors in the US. More precisely, he created graphs that show the estimated prevalence of adults (65 years or older) who have had all their natural teeth extracted. The dental profession
Good news...an analytics survey last year found that 72% of insurance executive agreed that analytics is the biggest game-changer in the next 2 years. Bad news...compared to other industries the adoption rates of analytics in the insurance has lagged other industries. To reverse this trend and help insurers travel down the
During a lighthearted moment in a serious conversation, Howard Schmidt, cyber security advisor to multiple presidents, told a Wall Street Journal interviewer that relying on a government agency as your primary backstop during a major cyber security breach is akin to calling Ghostbusters: you might not get the help you
Luckily, or perhaps better said, hopefully, we only need to make the big life decisions every now and then. What school to go to? Who to marry? What job to take? Where to live? There’s no penultimate answer to these decisions, but we all take them to the best of
When I was a kid, I remember a motivational poster on my dentist's wall that said "You don't have to brush all your teeth -- only the ones you want to keep." That poster really made me think, and brush my teeth! And now that I'm a data-analyst adult, I think
The amount of data being produced and captured from the plant floor today is staggering. When you add it all up, a factory can easily generate over 34 Terabytes of data per day, or nearly 9 Petabytes a year - that's 9 Million Gigabytes! Yet, with all of those systems, and all
We’ve been talking about data recently at the Analytic Hospitality Executive. I’ve advocated to use whatever data you have, big or small, to get started today on analytic initiatives that will help you avoid big data paralysis. In this blog, I’m going to get a bit more technical than usual
When I was a kid learning about the solar system and building those models out of hastily-painted styrofoam balls of varying sizes, Pluto was a planet. A full-fledged, legitimate planet just like the other eight. But In August of 2006, just 7 months after NASA launched the New Horizons Mission
What's that productivity related quote by Charles Dickens? "My advice is never do tomorrow what you can do today." For years, machine learning has been written about and discussed widely with a focus on the benefits it will bring in the near future. But guess what? The future for machine learning
Wären Sie in der Lage, rechtzeitig auf Sicherheitslücken in Ihrem Unternehmen zu reagieren, sei es in der Produktion oder in der IT, auch wenn es Made in Germany hieße? Könnten Sie Ausfälle oder Qualitätsprobleme frühzeitig erkennen? Wie sähe es aus, wenn Sie feststellen würden, dass Ihre Kunden nicht mehr mit
One of the most important skills for data scientists and business analytical professionals is communications. If decision makers and managers don't understand what the numbers mean -- results won't turn into action. Jeff Zeanah, President of Z Solutions, Inc. has been presenting on the topic of speaking “analytics” for many
