Business forecasting is a highly politicized process, subject to the biases and personal agendas of all forecasting process participants. This is why many -- perhaps most -- human adjustments to the forecast fail to make it better. And this is why relative metrics, such as FVA, are so helpful in
Big data is of no use unless you can turn it into information and insight. For that you need big analytics. Every piece of the analytics cycle has been impacted by big data, from reporting, with the need to quickly render reports from billions of rows of data, through advanced
Perhaps forecasting is a little of both, crystal ball and competitive edge. It’s a crystal ball of sorts because it helps leaders get answers to questions like, “How many? Or, “How much?” to decide what actions best help the business. And it’s definitely a competitive edge when it results in
Are you a legitimate hard-working company that has been threatened with a lawsuit, by a patent troll? If so, the graphs in this blog should make you happy! Speaking of 'happy' and 'troll' - here's a picture of a happy Troll Doll from my friend Hannah. Don't you just hate
Laut aktuellem Gartner Hype Cycle ist der Hype um Big Data verglüht und die Phase der Ernüchterung ist eingetreten. Da höre ich schon viele in den Unternehmen sagen: "Hab ich ja gleich gesagt", "Das war total überbewertet", "Wir haben bei uns im Unternehmen keine Big Data", "Wir dürfen aufgrund des Datenschutzes
For most people, this time of year means celebrating cherished, personal traditions… helping those less fortunate…flocking to stores in droves…the company holiday party… For the SAS Security Intelligence team, it means identity theft…benefits fraud…unemployment insurance fraud...insider threats. Why? Because next week is International Fraud Awareness Week! And we’re celebrating by
Earlier this week I managed to catch up briefly with Christoph Sporleder, Vice President Centers of Excellence for EMEA & Asia Pacific, to talk Hadoop, big data and get some of his views on where we might be headed with big data. Mark Torr: Is big data just a buzz
What do the following have in common? A homeowner inflates the value of his home entertainment equipment stolen during a robbery. A parent states they are the primary driver for their child’s car. A doctor charges for a non-existent procedure. A construction company underreports payroll or misclassifies an employee’s duties.
¿Tiene datos muertos que se convierten en irrelevantes o no confiables? ¿Le pasa que los datos que extrae por lo general crean confusión en los informes y hacen difícil la toma de decisiones? Si la respuesta es sí y usted está viviendo alguna de estas situaciones en su empresa, es
There are times when I harken back to the classic television show M.A.S.H. For those of you too young to remember, the story centered around a mobile Army surgical hospital in the midst of the conflict in the Korean peninsula. While they weren't the first people to see the patient, the unit
Heute in Berlin: Die Welt der Cloud Services wird einer der Schwerpunkte der SAP TechEd und d-code und ist sicher auch für mich eines der spannendsten Themen in der IT. Sogar Fragestellungen, die den Einsatz analytischer Verfahren mit ansprechenden Namen wie Neuronale Netze oder Support Vector Machines voraussetzen, werden in Zukunft
My Mum could have been a doctor – most can’t read her handwriting. It’s only because I’ve been trained to read it, I can. The analysis of unstructured data is similar. Text analysts can be quickly overwhelmed to learn that you have to manually develop a training corpus. Reading a
When I studied high school geometry, I noticed that many homework problems involved right triangles whose side lengths were integers. The canonical example is the 3-4-5 right triangle, which has legs of length 3 and 4 and a hypotenuse of length 5. The triple (3, 4, 5) is called a
In his Spring 2014 article in Foresight, Paul Goodwin addressed the important issue of point vs. probabilistic forecasts. A point forecast is a single number (e.g., the forecast for item XYZ in December is 635 units). We are all familiar with point forecasts, as these are what's commonly produced (either
SAS UK & Ireland recently ran a competition to find the region's 'top data scientist'; the competition challenge was to produce a forecast of energy demand for the UK in the year 2020 based on the data provided. Competition for this coveted award was fierce; with the winner claiming a trip to SAS
The Advanced Analytics division of SAS Research & Development has announced three Summer Fellowships in the areas of Forecasting and Econometrics. The SAS forecasting fellowships are open to doctoral candidates in mathematics, statistics, computer science, and related graduate departments in the United States. They offer the opportunity to work closely
Going Beyond Regulatory-Mandated Tests to Achieve True Risk Management I regularly hear banking customers talk about ‘sweating their assets’ - leveraging their substantial investments in expanded teams of risk analysts, re-engineered processes and new risk systems for Basel II and III compliance – to gain better insights into their business.
I love Christmas, but there is one thing I never seem to get right: the office Secret Santa. Every year I draw someone I’ve barely met and fruitlessly dig around for clues – only to find myself hastily wrapping a scented candle/novelty mug at the eleventh hour. Merry Christmas Sandra
I was recently asked about how to use the SAS/IML language to efficiently add a constant to every element of a matrix diagonal. Mathematically, the task is to form the matrix sum A + kI, where A is an n x n matrix, k is a scalar value, and I is the
By infusing analytics through every phase of the guest journey, hotel managers can help shore up the complicated balance between the guest experience and revenue and profit responsibilities – delivering memorable and personalized guest experiences, while maximizing revenue and profits. To accomplish this, hotels need to be able to collect,
It's time for a fall fraud roundup. Bad deeds swirl around like so many dry leaves, and I'd like to highlight a few of them this week. It can happen anywhere, even in sports, and no, I'm not picking on those shoplifting Dallas Cowboys here. An MLS referee was suspended for workers' compensation
My colleague Robert Allison has a knack for finding fascinating data. Last week he did it again by locating data about how blood types and Rh factors vary among countries. He produced a series of eight world maps, each showing the prevalence of a blood type (A+, A-, B+, B-,
Back in the 90s, there was a song by the C&C Music Factory about things that just didn't quite make sense - the song was called Things That Make You Go Hmm.... And in that same spirit, this blog post is about Graphs That Make You Go Hmm... I'm not
Data has value IF you can analyze it, said participants at a big data analytics roundtable at the Premier Business Leadership Series in Las Vegas. In attendance were executives from some of the largest Communications companies in the world including from the US, Canada, Turkey, Japan, Australia and the Philippines as well
David Corliss of Ford Motor Co. is currently writing a book about clustering methods in time series analysis. I caught up with him at the Analytics 2014 conference in Las Vegas last month (where he was also presenting on this topic) to talk about these methods and why he decided
Es scheint schon alles zu Big Data gesagt worden. Aber immer noch sind nur wenige gelungene Big Data-Projekte bekannt, wenn man mal von den üblichen Verdächtigen aus dem Silicon Valley absieht. Woran liegt das denn? Folgende Möglichkeiten: 1. Es gibt keine erfolgreichen Big Data Projekte 2. Es gibt überhaupt kein
In my article about how to create a quantile plot, I chose not to discuss a theoretical issue that occasionally occurs. The issue is that for discrete data (which includes rounded values), it might be impossible to use quantile values to split the data into k groups where each group
In sports these days, there's a lot more data to keep track of than just the score! How can you make sense of it all? Being the Graph Guy, of course I recommend graphing it! Here's an example that's up close and personal for me - dragon boat racing... Below
With big data, data governance challenges escalate in many ways: The diversity of data sources means that there are minimal standards for data structure, definition, semantics and content. The lack of control over data production means that you can’t enforce data quality at the source as you can do with
En un momento en el que el boom del Big Data se está enfocando en la tecnología y en las grandes oportunidades que crea, es posible que se le esté prestando poca atención a la forma en la que las grandes cantidades de información que se generan a diario, están
