Last week, as part of an article on how spammers generate comments for blogs, I showed how to generate random messages by using the CATX function in the DATA step. In that example, the strings were scalar quantities, but you can also concatenate vectors of strings in the SAS/IML language.
What if you could rank where you stand versus your industry peers when it comes to how effectively you're making use of your data through analytics? Now you can. Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at SAS, outlined an eight-metric test at today’s Premier Business Leadership Series
The US health care industry is always getting a bad rap. It takes heat for being too expensive or not efficient enough or just too complicated. We know we need it, and that living long and healthy lives requires it. But we also know we love to complain about it
Was gibt es zu „Big Data“, das nicht schon „big-time-häufig“ gesagt, geschrieben, irgendwo kopiert und wieder niedergeschrieben wurde? Und damit Big Data erst möglich macht? Eine ganze Menge! Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger eröffnete den zweiten Tag der re:publica auf der großen Bühne mit diesem Thema. Nachfolgend fasse ich den Vortrag zusammen – mit
This SAS tutorial video will show you how to generate plots for two continuous numeric variables with Base SAS. Basic scatter plots, linear or curvilinear regression lines, confidence intervals or ellipses, and multiple plot overlays are demonstrated. To learn more about this topic, check out our SAS Programming 1: Essentials
It was just a couple of years ago that folks were skeptical about the term "data scientist". It seemed like a simple re-branding of an established job role that carried titles such as "business analyst", "data manager", or "reporting specialist". But today, it seems that the definition of the "Data
In my recent post on how to understand character vectors in SAS/IML, I left out an important topic: How can you allocate a character vector of a specified length? In this article, "length" means the maximum number of characters in an element, not the number of elements in a vector.
Según datos de la Asociación Mexicana de Internet A.C. (AMIPCI), la mitad de los usuarios de Internet en México se conectan a la red a través de dispositivos móviles y se espera que para el 2015, las aplicaciones móviles (Apps) superen a las de escritorio no sólo en el país
In my previous post in the Ask the Statistician interview series, we heard from statisticians at the Analytics 2013 conference discuss the how their statistical results are put into action within their organizations. Now let’s learn more about their specific examples of success they have had utilizing these results. Check out
I'm currently working on a large project for a SAS customer. The project comprises many activities and phases, so there is a need to track progress on many different levels. During a recent meeting the project manager announced, "I'm putting together a status deck, and I'll include some Harvey Balls
El Big Data y la Nube se están volviendo inseparables: “se necesitan recursos en la nube para el almacenamiento y la ejecución de proyectos de big data, y el big data brinda a las compañías una buena ocasión de pasar a la nube”. Podríamos decir que el big data y
In my previous post, I discussed sampling error (i.e., when a randomly chosen sample doesn’t reflect the underlying population, aka margin of error) and sampling bias (i.e., when the sample isn’t randomly chosen at all), both of which big data advocates often claim can, and should, be overcome by using all the data. In this
Last week Chris Hemedinger posted an article about spam that is sent to SAS blogs and discussed how anti-spam software helps to block spam. No algorithm can be 100% accurate at distinguishing spam from valid comments because of the inherent trade-off between specificity and sensitivity in any statistical test. Therefore,
Jill Dyché, internationally recognized speaker, author and business consultant, spends her days talking to businesses about big data – how they’re using it, challenges, successes, strategies, plans and more. What she’s hearing again and again from IT leaders is that they have to innovate with big data, move quickly and
All my friends seem to be having twins these days (below is a picture of my friend Holly's twins, for example) - I wondered if I could use SAS to analyze this twinning trend ... When I was growing up, way back in the day, twins seemed to be rarity.
All Analytics spoke with several leaders at the recent SAS Global Forum Executive Conference on what it means to build an analytics culture. Here’s a video of those conversations. The video features several sections related to building an analytics culture: Kim Nevala, Director of Business Strategy for the SAS Best
Principle 5: Timeliness – A bank should be able to generate aggregate and up-to-date risk data in a timely manner while also meeting the principles relating to accuracy and integrity, completeness and adaptability. A timely and accurate view of risk exposure, aggregated across credit counterparties and financial products could have
SAS programmers are probably familiar with how SAS stores a character variable in a data set, but how is a character vector stored in the SAS/IML language? Recall that a character variable is stored by using a fixed-width storage structure. In the SAS DATA step, the maximum number of characters
Ofrecer a los mexicanos Educación de Calidad es parte de la Estrategia Digital Nacional; para llevar a cabo este objetivo el Gobierno de la República Mexicana plantea la integración y aprovechamiento de las TIC en el proceso educativo, de tal manera que sea posible insertar al país en la Sociedad
I'm an avid Star Wars fan, and am cautiously optimistic about what J.J. Abrams intends to do in Star Wars VII. The cast for the movie was revealed earlier this week, and today is May the Fourth, an unofficial Star Wars holiday. You might be asking yourself what any of
If you've followed technology news in the last few weeks, you've probably seen a proliferation of awestruck faces wearing blacked out goggles, similar to the image I'm using here. The goggles are Oculus Rift immersive VR headsets, and the news is the $2 billion dollar acquisition of Oculus by Facebook.
My oldest son is in the school band, and they are getting ready for their spring concert. Their fall concert was wonderful; hearing dozens of students with their specific instruments playing together creates beautiful, rich sounding music. The depth of sound from orchestral or symphonic music is unmatched. In data
Ed wants to make sure that the next generation of technology is accessible, and the best way to do that is to ensure the next generation of computer scientists understand the needs of users with disabilities. So, he and I get out of the office on a regular basis to
Here at SAS, we've come a long way with how we deal with blog spam on blogs.sas.com. Last year at this time, I was sifting through dozens of spam messages per day in order to salvage the one or two genuine comments that originate from real readers. I was just
As we saw in Steve Morlidge's study of forecast quality in the supply chain (Part 1, Part 2), 52% of the forecasts in his sample were worse than a naive (random walk) forecast. This meant that over half the time, these companies would have been better off doing nothing and
Debido al crecimiento masivo de las Tecnologías de la Información en la última década, el Chief Information Officer (CIO) ha pasado de tener una función de apoyo de back-office a una unidad de negocio crítica para las decisiones rentables del negocio. En la actualidad se ubica entre las cinco áreas con
In his recent Financial Times article, Tim Harford explained the big data that interests many companies is what we might call found data – the digital exhaust from our web searches, our status updates on social networks, our credit card purchases and our mobile devices pinging the nearest cellular or WiFi network.
While at a conference recently, I was asked whether it was possible to use SAS to simulate data from an inverse gamma distribution. The SAS customer had looked at the documentation for the RAND function and did not see "inverse gamma" listed among the possible choices. The answer is "yes."
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger ist Oxford-Professor, Berater internationaler Organisationen sowie einer der Keynote-Speaker der re:publica 2014. In seinem Bestseller „Big Data: Eine Revolution, die unser Leben verändern wird" wirft er ein kritisches Licht auf Big Data Analytics – zeichnet aber auch positive Szenarien auf. Wir haben ihn gefragt zu seinen Forderungen an
With tornadoes in the news lately, I wondered how I might could use SAS to analyze tornado data. How about animating 60 years of tornado path data? ... I was using Google to search for ways to analyze tornado data, and found an example on ustornadoes.com that animates the tornado
