The other day I was doing some computations that caused me to wonder, "What is the smallest power of 2 that is greater than a given number?" The mathematics is straightforward. Given a number n, find the least value of k such that 2k ≥ n or, equivalently, k ≥
Have you ever thought about how to improve your Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) process beyond where you might be today? There's certainly no lack of advice on the topic of S&OP on the Internet. Some articles focus on the overall process while others focus on S&OP software and related support tools. In
In recent times, Britain has increasingly developed an "inquiry culture." Whenever there’s malpractice or a scandal – be it the Leveson inquiry or the recent investigation into the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust – an inquiry serves to give citizens, public leaders and governing bodies an explanation of how and
Many people enjoy solving word games such as the daily Cryptoquote puzzle, which uses a simple substitution cipher to disguise a witty or wise quote by a famous person. A common way to attack the puzzle is frequency analysis. In frequency analysis you identify letters and pairs of letters (bigrams)
At a recent MESA - Hollywood IT Society Digital Marketing conference, Claudio Ludovisi, SVP, Operational Strategy NBCU Entertainment for Marketing & Digital took a live poll of about 200 or so media marketing executives in the audience and asked them to “Think about what it takes to achieve true multiplatform
SAS software has long been used to help analyze 'risk' - what about using it to help determine your risk of being attacked by a vampire?!? On a previous Halloween, I was the victim of a Vampire attack. Here's the photographic proof... Being the most common O+ blood type, I
Finding people with the range of skills classified as data science can be a challenge, which is why some call them unicorns (do they really exist?), so I recently posted ten tips on finding unicorns. In my first post I elaborated on tips 1 and 2 (1. hire from an
Greetings, insignificant souls. You may call me … Gregor Castamere. It is not my true name. I stalked this strip of land when it was called New Amsterdam. My family’s name is well known. I have lived for more than 600 years, concealing my terrible secret. I am a vampire.
Innovation is easy. All you need to do is three things. First, have a great idea. Go on, I’ll wait. Next, make it happen. And, once that’s done, just make sure you work out how to commercialise it somehow. Innovation’s never simple, even at the best of times. Moving from
The Global Hadoop market was valued at $1.5 billion in 2012 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 58.2 percent, to reach $50.2 billion by 2020, according to a Hadoop Market Analysis report prepared by Allied Market Research. There is no doubt that IT teams are
One of my presentations at SAS Global Forum 2014 was about the new heat map functions in SAS/IML 13.1. Over the summer I created a short video of my presentation, which gives an overview of visualizing matrices with heat maps, and describes how to choose colors for heat maps: If
Volatility. It’s a business reality for energy market participants and it’s been a wild ride for the oil marketing business over the past few weeks. How has your energy risk data helped you navigate the recent increase in volatility and precipitous price drop? This month, we are launching a recurring
This week I’m going to “fill in” for Natalie to complete our series on “What can Hotels learn from Casinos”? (Look for parts 1 and 2 here and here, respectively) Today I’m going to address pricing. We all know that great entertainment comes at a price, and we also know
Perhaps the greatest legacy that Ford Motor Company’s former chief executive, Alan Mulally, left behind is a culture of analytics. Ford began using analytics in the late 1990’s, but it wasn’t until their financial woes in the 2000’s and Mulally’s arrival in 2006, that analytics started to be used regularly for
If you are a citizen of a western industrialized country and were born in the 1970s, you probably grew up in a multicultural society. Personally, I come from such a society and I was always extremely excited about meeting people with different cultural backgrounds. My classmates and friends came from
In a previous blog post, I showed how to layer colored areas on a SAS map to show both countries, and the areas within countries that had cases of Ebola. But as the Ebola epidemic has spread, more data has become available, and in this blog I show how to
Last week, I was fortunate enough to attend the Insurance Networking News Analytics Symposium. This great event had several engaging speakers. As analytics becomes more prevalent within insurance, it was refreshing to see that many organizations discuss their successes and share best practices in this essential aspect of the business.
Did you know: For 13 percent of car buyers a new vehicle without internet access is a no-go? Obviously, no-go means no-buy. Thirteen percent! If I have ever seen a market demand, it is this. For sure, the industry will respond to that. The management consulting company Bain even expects
In 2015 Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting will celebrate 10 years of publication. From high in his aerie in the Colorado Rockies, here is Editor-in-Chief Len Tashman's preview of the current issue: In this 35th issue of Foresight, we revisit a topic that always generates lively and entertaining
Durante los últimos años se ha hablado mucho sobre la cultura de la analítica. En muchos discursos, conversaciones con clientes e incluso en este post es un tema que surge una y otra vez sin llegar a un punto concreto. Entonces sale a la luz la siguiente pregunta ¿Cómo crear
What is kurtosis? What does negative or positive kurtosis mean, and why should you care? How do you compute kurtosis in SAS software? It is not clear from the definition of kurtosis what (if anything) kurtosis tells us about the shape of a distribution, or why kurtosis is relevant to
Companies like Amazon, Netflix, Zappos and Pandora have changed what consumers expect from a brand – they want brands to “know” what they want before they ask for it. To provide those kinds of personalized products and services, brands have to collect and analyze huge quantities of customer and industry
In a city built on hedging your bets, it is fitting that the Analytics 2014 conference kicked off Monday in Las Vegas with a look at all the unscientific ways people try to predict the future. John Elder, Founder and President of Elder Research, Inc., entertained the audience with examples of how
When it’s claimed that the UK government could be wasting money that’s equivalent to the current spending on state pensions – and considerably more than what’s spent by the Department for Education – you know that action is needed. The Policy Exchange recently issued a report – Smaller, Better, Faster,
Europol, the law enforcement agency of the European Union, in its recently released 2014 Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (iOCTA), cited a report by U.S. security firm IID that predicts that the first “online murder” will occur by year end, based on the number of computer security system flaws discovered
Welcome to the blog “Operations Research with SAS: Optimize, Simulate, Understand.” For those of you without an operations research background, a brief explanation: operations research (OR) is the study of the operations of systems, with a focus on making them function more efficiently and more effectively. The overall goal of
All hail the data lake, destroyer of enterprise data warehouses and the solution to all our enterprise data access problems! Ok – well, maybe not. In part four of this series I want to talk about the confusion in the market I am seeing around the data lake phrase, including
A few years ago I wrote an article that shows how to compute the log-determinant of a covariance matrix in SAS. This computation is often required to evaluate a log-likelihood function. My algorithm used the ROOT function in SAS/IML to compute a Cholesky decomposition of the covariance matrix. The Cholesky
As this article on the mythical data scientist describes, many people call this special kind of analytical talent "unicorns," because the breed can be so hard to find. In order to close the analytical talent gap that McKinsey Global Institute and others have predicted, and many of you experience today, SAS launched
There’s a restaurant here in Raleigh called the Angus Barn. It’s one of my favorite places to eat and unwind after work. They’ve got top-notch steak and quality cold beer, but what really sets the place apart is the customer experience they provide. There’s a cigar room in the back
