Insurance relies on the ability to predict future claims or loss exposure based on historical information and experience. However, insurers face an uncertain future due to spiraling operational costs, escalating regulatory pressures, increasing competition and greater customer expectations. More than ever, insurance companies need to optimize their business processes. But
Today’s natural language processing (NLP) systems can do some amazing things, including enabling the transformation of unstructured data into structured numerical and/or categorical data. Why is this important? Because once the key information has been identified or a key pattern modeled, the newly created, structured data can be used in
New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg made a new-year's resolution to learn code. Apple’s Steve Jobs said, “I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.” President Barrack Obama said, "Don't just buy a new video game, make one.
On Monday, SAS announced the beginning of a new era with its Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions OEM partnership. This is the first time SAS has provided its technology for an equipment manufacturer to wrap into its solution to help retail customers gain the benefits of advanced analytics. We always ask
In my previous post I used junk drawers as an example of the downside of including more data in our analytics just in case it helps us discover more insights only to end up with more flotsam than findings. In this post I want to float some thoughts about a two-word concept
Last week I attended SAS Global Forum 2015 in Dallas. It was packed with almost 5,000 attendees. I learned many interesting things at the conference, including the fact that you need to arrive EARLY to the statistical presentations if you want to find an empty seat! It was gratifying to
The primary objective of many discrete-event simulation projects is system investigation. Output data from the simulation model are used to better understand the operation of the system (whether that system is real or theoretical), as well as to conduct various "what-if"-type analyses. However, I recently worked on another model
By now, we have all heard about the Internet of Things (IoT), or the Industrial Internet. Across industries, organizations are attempting to instrument and measure all critical business systems and assets in an effort to drive improved production and service delivery. It is estimated that by 2020, companies will spend
Did you ever wish you could master SAS/GRAPH, and create graphs and maps that were customized exactly like you wanted them? Then this free eBook is for you! Probably the most memorable book for me was the Necronomicon in the Army of Darkness movie. How many of you liked that
@philsimon says that, yes, we can learn a great deal.
any factors go into your strategic global business decisions, from the physical placement of factories and distribution centers, to your choice of suppliers and partners, to your target markets and the business model itself. Businesses have a choice of fundamental global go-to-market investment strategies, from direct foreign investment on the one
I'm a huge Star Wars fan. I got chills when I saw the trailer for The Force Awakens! Last year for SAS Global Forum, I wrote a paper called Star Wars and the Art of Data Science. I explored the scripts from the original Star Wars trilogy (A New Hope,
If you’re one of the hundreds of SAS users registered for PharmaSUG, scheduled for May 17-20 in Orlando, you should give extending your stay some serious thought. In just a few hours, you can set yourself apart with a professional certification from SAS! SAS is offering something no theme park
I read an interesting article recently that suggested analyst and data scientist job positions may be on the way out. The author argued that analytics are being incorporated more and more heavily into operational systems, making “analytic capabilities” more readily accessible to business users without the involvement of a data scientist. Being a data
In April, the free trial of SAS Data Loader for Hadoop became available globally. Now, you can take a test drive of our new technology designed to increase the speed and ease of managing data within Hadoop. The downloads might take a while (after all, this is big data), but I think you’ll
Did you know that if you have set multiple titles in SAS, that there is an easy way to remove them? For example, suppose that you've written the following statements, which call the TITLE statement to set three titles: title "A Great Big Papa Title"; title2 "A Medium-sized Mama Title";
The Boulder, The Cliff, and The Baby Imagine you are faced with this very urgent problem: A large boulder is teetering on the edge of a cliff, at the bottom of which sits a baby, at risk of being crushed. How do you solve this problem? One solution for the
We’re celebrating the student in all of us and you’re invited. Email us a photo of yourself or your fav SAS user learning SAS. Send it to sastraining@sas.com. You can also Tweet us your best shot using #SASworldclass Our planet-friendly training is available worldwide, wherever you may be. Show us
With the recent introduction of the Protecting American Talent and Entrepreneurship (PATENT Act), the US Senate set aside partisan politics to take on a problem that plagues all industries, but especially high-tech. In front of Congress, in the media and in a previous blog post, I have decried the current
It’s an incredibly exciting time for data science. Just ask Jake Porway, former New York Times Data Scientist and now CEO of DataKind, who opened his April 28 SAS Global Forum keynote by asking busy conference goers to pause and reflect on the revolutionary times we are living in. “Cell phones
Data governance and data virtualization can become powerful allies. The word governance is not be understood here as a law but more as a support and vision for business analytics application. Our governance processes must become agile the same way our business is transforming. Data virtualization, being a very versatile
As the age old idiom goes, the early bird gets the worm and the early adopter gets the break. New technologies give clear advantages to those organisations that figure out before their early-adopting competitors how to use them effectively, an advantage that recedes as others catch up, and the technology
In the last post, we talked about creating the requirements for the data analytics, and profiling the data prior to load. Now, let’s consider how to filter, format and deliver that data to the analytics application. Filter – the act of selecting the data of interest to be used in the
Suppose that you compute the correlation matrix (call it R1) for a set of variables x1, x2, ..., x8. For some reason, you later want to compute the correlation matrix for the variables in a different order, maybe x2, x1, x7,..., x6. Do you need to go back to the
We’ve all heard the old saw, “If you torture data long enough, eventually it will confess to something.” But when it comes to spurring real change, how about ditching the dungeon-master act and thinking like a venture capitalist instead? Wouldn’t that pay bigger dividends? That was the tip from Ravi
“What we do to our children they will do to society.” Greek philosopher Pliny the Elder said that more than 2,000 years ago, and it’s just as true today. In 2013, more than 600,000 children in the US were confirmed victims of maltreatment in the home, according to U.S. Department
In the era of big data, we collect, prepare, manage, and analyze a lot of data that is supposed to provide us with a better picture of our customers, partners, products, and services. These vast data murals are impressive to behold, but in painting such a broad canvas, these pictures
The SAS Business Knowledge Series now offers an online version of the "Forecast Value Added Analysis" course, taught via live web in two afternoon sessions, May 7-8. The instructor is my colleague Chip Wells, who expanded our original 1/2 day FVA workshop with new material, examples, and exercises based on his
The Institute of Business Forecasting's FVA blog series continued on March 2, with my interview of Steve Morlidge of CatchBull. Steve's research (and his articles in Foresight) have been a frequent subject of BFD blog posts over the last couple of years (e.g. The "Avoidability of Forecast Error (4 parts),
I've seen a lot of recent news articles purporting income inequality in the U.S. ("the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer") ... and I wondered if the graphs were a true/unbiased representation of the data. For example, I recently saw a couple of graphs in an article on the
