Looking forward, ten of my SAS colleagues and I are heading to New York City this weekend for KDD 2014: Data Science for the Social Good, which runs August 24-27. This event’s full name is the 20th Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining,
How do you learn best? In your sleep, when the unconscious mind is most receptive to suggestions? Calling to the “powers that be” for one of those “aha” moments when everything just sinks in? Swearing to your parents that you were actually studying when you came up with this plan?
It's easy to plot events that happened at a certain time, but what about events that extended over a range of dates, such as recessions? ... This blog post teaches you a nice trick to use for that! Let's say you have a plot of the labor force participation rate
A lot of data quality projects kick off in the quest for root-cause discovery. Sometimes they’ll get lucky and find a coding error or some data entry ‘finger flubs’ that are the culprit. Of course, data quality tools can help a great deal in speeding up this process by automating
My wife got one of those electronic activity trackers a few months ago and has been diligently walking every day since then. At the end of the day she sometimes reads off how many steps she walked, as measured by her activity tracker. I am always impressed at how many
Did you hear that Prince William is getting a new job? Next year, he’ll fly emergency helicopters for the East Anglian Air Ambulance. The prince, who’ll donate his salary to charity, called his new gig “one of the finest forms of public service.” The Duke of Cambridge won’t get any
If you read SAS blogs but never click through to the comment sections, you're missing some great information. Need proof? Check out some of these comments from the last few weeks. And then leave one of your own. Kelly McGuire has been studying the effects of negative hotel reviews online.
For Hadoop to be successful as part of the modern data architecture, it needs to integrate with existing tools. This integration allows you to reuse existing resources (licenses and personnel) and is typically 60% of the evaluation criteria for integration of Hadoop into the data center. One of the most
Even though it sounds like something you hear on a Montessori school playground, this theme “Share your cluster” echoes across many modern Apache Hadoop deployments. Data architects are plotting to assemble all their big data in one system – something that is now achievable thanks to the economics of modern
My previous post explained how confirmation bias can prevent you from behaving like the natural data scientist you like to imagine you are by driving your decision making toward data that confirms your existing beliefs. This post tells the story of another cognitive bias that works against data science. Consider the following scenario: Company-wide
In a previous blog post, I showed how to use the graph template language (GTL) in SAS to create heat maps with a continuous color ramp. SAS/IML 13.1 includes the HEATMAPCONT subroutine, which makes it easy to create heat maps with continuous color ramps from SAS/IML matrices. Typical usage includes
If you're a really big company, with many locations around the country, how do you keep track of all that? ... With a great map, of course! I recently read a CNN article about the Community Health Systems network being hacked - exposing the names, Social Security numbers, physical addresses, birthdays
Introduction Understanding the behavior of your customers is key to improving and maintaining revenue streams. It is a an important part when crafting successful marketing campaigns. With SAS Visual Analytics 7.1 you can analyze, explore and visualize user behavior, click paths and other event-based scenarios. Monitoring the customer journey by visualizing
What kind of security do we need for this conversion? In fact, where are the security people? Including security personnel upfront in any conversion project can sure save some time and heartache later. It is important to include security for the following: Source system access – You must be able
Before I started my internship with SAS, my only experience with data or analysis came from an “Introduction to Statistics” course I took freshman year to satisfy my math requirement. If I’d known then that statistics and knowing SAS programming would be the #1 skill for a bigger paycheck, or
Ein Gastbeitrag von Anne Belder, SAS Niederlande. „Die Zukunft der Banken ist digital.“ - Der unabhängige Autor und Finanzmarktanalyst Chris Skinner schreibt in seinem Buch "Digital Bank" über die radikale Veränderung im Banking. Viele Ansätze lassen sich daraus ableiten, die gerade aus Sicht eines Big Data Analytics Experten eine besondere
Heat maps have many uses. In a previous article, I showed how to use heat maps with a discrete color ramp to visualize matrices that have a small number of unique values, such as certain covariance matrices and sparse matrices. You can also use heat maps with a continuous color
Sin datos no hay experiencia del cliente, sin calidad de datos no hay lealtad verdadera, y sin integración de datos no hay esperanza de una experiencia omnicanal. Y es a través de esta experiencia, que las empresas buscan conectarse con el cliente y crear una estrategia personalizada que cubra sus
"Trending" is one of those words that's trending these days, as we verbify everything. And if you understood that, then you'll probably love this blog! :-) For those of you not hip to the lingo ('hip' meaning 'knowing about and following the newest styles, fashions, etc.'), dictionary.com defines trending as "to emerge
This week’s author tip is from Jack Shostak’s new book SAS Programming in the Pharmaceutical Industry, Second Edition. If you're interested in this week's free tip and want to learn more about the topic or book, visit our online catalog. You'll find a free book excerpt, example code and data, and more. General
Find out which state you'll live in, if the US state borders are redrawn so we have 50 states with equal population! (Don't worry! - This is just a fun/hypothetical "what if" blog!) To get you in the mood for this topic, here's a picture of one of the many
In my industry of data and computer science, precision is typically regarded as a virtue. The more exact that you can be, the better. Many of my colleagues are passionate about the idea, which isn't surprising for a statistical software company. But in social media, precision is a stigma --
Nowadays we hear a lot about how important it is that we are data-driven in our decision-making. We also hear a lot of criticism aimed at those that are driven more by intuition than data. Like most things in life, however, there’s a big difference between theory and practice. It’s
One of the things I enjoy about blogging is that I often learn something new. Last week I wrote about how to optimize a function that is defined in terms of an integral. While developing the program in the article, I made some mistakes that generated SAS/IML error messages. By
After the 2014 FIFA World Cup, one thing’s clear: here at SAS, we love football (soccer in the US!). To wrap up the popular 2014 World Cup data visualization series on the SAS Visual Analytics Community, we created a presentation that’s chocked-full of interesting insights. From the trillions of pieces
Wouldn’t it be nice to have an expert to answer your SAS Visual Analytics question? Now you do and the best part, it’s free! Beginning September 8, SAS will be hosting a one-hour Ask the Expert session each Monday through November. Each interactive session will focus on a specific Visual
I’m sitting here staring at a book on my shelf entitled, “Impending Crisis”. Even knowing the copyright date, 2003, it could still be about any one of several possible crises: healthcare, financial, energy, education, environment. But no, in this case the impending crisis in question is provided by the subtitle: “Too many jobs,
A SAS customer wrote, "I have access to PROC IML through SAS OnDemand for Academics. What is the best way for me to learn to program in the SAS/IML language? How do I get started with PROC IML?" That is an excellent question, and I'm happy to offer some suggestions.
This week’s author tip is from Michele Burlew and her new book SAS Macro Programming Made Easy, Third Edition. Burlew chose this tip because she says the %SYSFUNC and %QSYSFUNC functions allow you to use SAS language functions in macro programming. Access to these functions greatly increases macro programming power
It is a mild summer evening in July at Lake Neusiedl here in Austria. The participants of the traditional YES Cup Regatta are sitting with beer and barbecue chops on the terrace of our clubhouse. The mood is relaxed, and everyone wants to tell their story after two eventful races.
