Last night, here in the U.S., an outbreak of deadly tornadoes tore across several states. Unfortunately, nobody knows how to predict a tornado with certainty, but let's brainstorm on how SAS Software can help analyze the data in the aftermath of a natural disaster like this... Being a graph guy, the first
Principle 4: Completeness – A bank should be able to capture and aggregate all material risk data across the banking group. Data should be available by business line, legal entity, asset type, industry, region and other groupings, as relevant for the risk in question, that permit identifying and reporting risk
Dear Rick, I am trying to create a numerical matrix with 100,000 rows and columns in PROC IML. I get the following error: (execution) Unable to allocate sufficient memory. Can IML allocate a matrix of this size? What is wrong? Several times a month I see a variation of this
What if virtual reality technology allowed you to immerse yourself in big data? That could be your future – and sooner than you think. It happened in August 2013 at the University of Washington: the first direct brain-to-brain communication, with one researcher controlling another researcher’s brain over Skype. Maybe in
This week's SAS tip is from Robert Virgile and his illuminating new book SAS Macro Language Magic: Discovering Advanced Techniques. Robert has 30 years of experience developing and teaching SAS classes. And his new book is filled with powerful programming techniques. If you like this week's free excerpt, you can read
¿Alguna vez ha imaginado una nave roja futurista que aterrizó en medio del desierto? Así es como se ve el mayor tejado de aluminio pre revestido del mundo: El parque temático cubierto Ferrari World en Abu Dabi, Emiratos Árabes Unidos. Ahora fíjese en la extraordinaria resistencia del color en este techo
Aiman Zeid is the author of the new book, Business Transformation: A Roadmap for Maximizing Organizational Insights. Aiman heads Organizational Transformation Services for SAS Institute’s Global Business Consulting unit. He has helped numerous organizations on four continents evaluate their organizational maturity and readiness to deploy business analytics. In this Q&A,
As we saw last time with Steve Morlidge's analysis of the M3 data, forecasts produced by experts under controlled conditions with no difficult-to-forecast series still failed to beat a naive forecast 30% of the time. So how bad could it be for real-life practitioners forecasting real-life industrial data? In two words:
Over the past few months, many US states and districts have received data about student growth and teacher effectiveness. Some educators experience the excitement of outstanding scores and, most importantly, the success of their students’ growth. Some quietly plug along, satisfied to be meeting growth targets and deciding if it isn’t broken,
In our hyper-connected world, information technology plays a key role in nearly every field and industry. Higher education is no exception, and that’s where EDUCAUSE comes in. This non-profit association works to advance higher education through the use of information technology. One of the primary ways EDUCAUSE achieves its goal
The Spring 2014 issue of Foresight includes Steve Morlidge's latest article on the topic of forecastability and forecasting performance. He reports on sample data obtained from eight business operating in consumer (B2C) and industrial (B2B) markets. Before we look at these new results, let's review his previous arguments: 1. All
As an unabashed lover of data, I am thrilled to be living and working in our increasingly data-constructed world. One new type of data analysis eliciting strong emotional reactions these days is the sentiment analysis of the directly digitized feedback from customers provided via their online reviews, emails, voicemails, text messages and social networking
Just one last short article about properties of the Hilbert matrix. I've already blogged about how to construct a Hilbert matrix in the SAS/IML language and how to compute a formula for the determinant. One reason that the Hilbert matrix is a famous (some would say infamous!) example in numerical
As I was doing my taxes, I wondered where the government is spending my tax dollars. And being a SAS user, I decided to find out using a graph ... I did a few Google searches on "tax graphs" and found one on the CNN web site that I liked - it
I’ve been to a fair number of SAS User Group International (SUGI) and SAS Global Forum conferences over the years, but I don’t think I’ve been to one as productive, well-organized and fun as this year’s conference in Washington DC. Part of what made the conference very relevant for many
Analytics gives us not just the ability but the imperative to separate our planning activities into two distinct segments – detailed planning that leads to budgets in support of execution, and high-level, analytic-enabled business/scenario planning. My critique of Control Towers in this blog last time led me not only to
Many factors have to work together for organizations to compete on big data analytics. First, you need the right technology. Second, you need to look at the skill set that is required to use the technology and the culture changes that are often needed. So how do you bring it
Curious about our bestselling books at SAS Global Forum? Well here they are on one glorious list. New books, books written by presenting authors, and SAS Certification Prep Guides topped the list this year. If you missed attending SAS Global Forum (or visiting our super busy onsite store in the demo
Principle 3: Accuracy and Integrity – A bank should be able to generate accurate and reliable risk data to meet normal and stress/crisis reporting accuracy requirements. Data should be aggregated on a largely automated basis so as to minimize the probability of errors. It seems logical that banks would want
I have previously written about the scope of local and global variables in the SAS/IML language. You might wonder whether SAS/IML modules can also have local scope. The answer is no. All SAS/IML modules are known globally and can be called by any other modules. Some object-oriented programming languages support
If you’re an analyst, you know discovery in a complicated data set is one of the toughest problems to solve. But did you know the Business Knowledge Series course, Exploratory Analysis for Large and Complex Problems Using SAS Enterprise Miner, can help you solve those issues by tackling real-world problems?
In writing the second edition of SAS Programming in the Pharmaceutical Industry, I knew that I wanted to replace the device-driven SAS/GRAPH figures with the new ODS template-driven graphics procedures. The latest developments in SAS graphics involve the template-driven procedures and tools found in SAS ODS graphics (i.e., ODS Graphics
Here is editor Len Tashman's preview of the new Spring 2014 issue of Foresight. In particular note the new article by Steve Morlidge of CatchBull, reporting on an analysis of eight B2B and B2C companies, which we'll discuss in a separate post. An organization’s collaboration in forecasting and planning has
Para tener óptima administración comercial y captar nuevos clientes, las compañías de telecomunicaciones necesitan un amplio conocimiento de sus infraestructuras y sus consumidores.
Would you like to analyze the 9 million lines of Medicare payment data that was recently made public? You'll need lots of luck if you're planning to use Excel ... whereas this is the kind of thing SAS was built for! Here's a sneak-peek at what the text data looks
This week's SAS tip is from Barry de Ville and Padraic Neville's enterprising new book Decision Trees for Analytics Using SAS Enterprise Miner. With their combined vast expertise, De Ville and Neville have created a comprehensive guide to decision tree theory, use, and applications. If you're interested in this week's free
When you run a program or task in SAS Enterprise Guide, the application wraps your job in an "ODS sandwich", the colloquial term we use for the ODS statements necessary to create output that can be viewed in your project. That's convenient for exploring and refining your program, but at
El gobierno de datos se ha convertido en un sello para todo lo que tiene que ver con los datos. De hecho, si busca el término en Google, encontrará referencias a la calidad de los datos, los metadatos, el almacenamiento de datos, la propiedad de los datos o la seguridad
Q: How would you set the target for demand planners: all products at 0.7? All at practical limit (0.5)? A: In principle, forecasts are capable of being brought to the practical limit of an RAE of 0.5. Whether it is sensible to attempt to do this for all products irrespective
Last week I described the Hilbert matrix of size n, which is a famous square matrix in numerical linear algebra. It is famous partially because its inverse and its determinant have explicit formulas (that is, we know them exactly), but mainly because the matrix is ill-conditioned for moderate values of
