There's big money in professional sports these days - we're talking billions of dollars! Do you know which teams are the most valuable? The graphs in this blog will show you... I recently saw a bar chart on dadaviz.com showing the world's most valuable sports teams. It was the right kind
Why visualization? Several reasons, actually, the most compelling being that sometimes visualization literally solves the problem for you. I remember an exercise in eighth grade English class where we were asked to describe, in words only, an object set in front of us with sufficient clarity such that our classmates,
Krystian Matusz is what I’d call a super SAS user. He currently holds seven out of the nine credentials SAS offers. SAS Certified Advanced Programmer for SAS 9 SAS Certified Base Programmer for SAS 9 SAS Certified BI Content Developer for SAS 9 SAS Certified Clinical Trials Programmer Using SAS
While I've often written about how to get your SAS data to Microsoft Excel in some automated way, I haven't really addressed what's probably the most frequently used method: copy and paste. SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1 added a nifty little feature that makes copy-and-paste even more useful. The new "Copy
Many people who plan data governance initiatives ignore the need for a business case. "We've already had approval for the project; why do we need a business case when we've got the budget signed off?" The perception is that because they have a strong commitment, there is no need to get
When using SAS to format a number as a percentage, there is a little trick that you need to remember: the width of the formatted value must include room for the decimal point, the percent sign, and the possibility of two parentheses that indicate negative values. The field width must
Right now I’m crossing the Pacific toward Australia and New Zealand for the 21st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (a.k.a. KDD), a Data Science Melbourne MeetUp, and the SAS Users of New Zealand conference. New Zealand is the birthplace of open source R. So this trip
It’s been very hot here in Northern Italy: electricity provision has struggled to keep up and we’ve had frequent power outages in the area, even within our apartment building. A bit inconvenient? Don’t get me started. I feel like my home appliances have turned against me, taking me back to
In my previous post I talked to John Cassara about the growing threat of mobile payments and how mobile phones can be used to launder illicit funds globally. I spoke with him again recently on the topic of financial intelligence. Here are the highlights from our discussion. So what is
.@philsimon offers his definition of the term.
I enjoy watching TV crime series like Law and Order, Crime Series Investigation (CSI), CriminalMinds, Numb3rs, Person of Interest, as well as real-life mystery stories on shows like 20/20 and others. Obviously, the popularity of these types of shows means I'm not the only one who enjoys this type of entertainment. Here at SAS,
Last week's post about odds ratio plots in SAS made me think about a similar plot that visualizes the parameter estimates for a regression analysis. The so-called regression coefficient plot is a scatter plot of the estimates for each effect in the model, with lines that indicate the width of
I've heard lots of people quote statistics about marriage & divorce, but the experts don't always agree on what the data means. So I decided to run the data through a SAS graphical analysis, and see what the numbers say ... Before we get into the numbers though, let's have a
Financial institutions have been managing their AML models to meet regulatory expectations for some time. But what about customer risk rating models? We’re seeing a trend where firms are re-evaluating whether their heuristic, rules-based customer risk rating models can withstand regulatory expectations. Rules-based models follow simple analytical formulas, such as,
With apologies to this candy advertisement from the 1980s: "Hey, you got your Lua in my SAS program." "You got your SAS code in my Lua program!" Announcer: "PROC LUA: Two great programming languages that program great together!" What is Lua? It's an embeddable scripting language that is often used
I recently saw a cool graph showing the US import/export trade deficit. But after studying it a bit, I realized I was perceiving it wrong. Follow along in this blog, to find out what the problem was, and how I redesigned the graph to avoid it. I was looking through dadaviz.com
Bigger doesn’t always mean better. And that’s often the case with big data. Your data quality (DQ) problem – no denial, please – often only magnifies when you get bigger data sets. Having more unstructured data adds another level of complexity. The need for data quality on Hadoop is shown by user
Imagine the following scenario. You have many data sets from various sources, such as individual stores or hospitals. You use the SAS DATA step to concatenate the many data sets into a single large data set. You give the big data set to a colleague who will analyze it. Later
In the oil and gas industry, analytics are used to improve both upstream and downstream operations, from optimizing exploration and forecasting production to reducing commodity trading risk and understanding customer's energy needs. If you plan to derive value from the digital oil field, big data, and analytics, one of the first things
In my quest for interesting data to graph, I found some Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) data on US domestic cannabis eradication. Does the data say anything interesting? Read on to find out! ... While doing some searches for other data, I happened across a table on the DEA website titled
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
