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
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
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.
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
Q: How important is it to recognize real trend change in noisy data? A: It is very important. In fact the job of any forecast algorithm is to predict the signal – whether it is trending or not – and to ignore the noise. Unfortuantely this is not easy to
I'm in the grocery store with a "mental" list of 3 items to pick up: bread, eggs, and something unusual like cupcake liners. My phone rings. It's my wife (or sometimes a daughter) asking me to pick up one or two more things, maybe orange juice and bananas. Suddenly, the
Autor: Karim Tsouli, CIO und Mitglied des Vorstands bei der CreditPlus Bank AG „Wenn Daten nicht nur aus Gründen der Dokumentation erfasst werden, sondern diese als Basis von Geschäftsentscheidungen dienen, kann Business Intelligence (BI) helfen, eine zuverlässige Analyse bereitzustellen." Karim Tsouli, CIO CreditPlus Bank AG
Principle 2: Data architecture and IT infrastructure – A bank should design, build and maintain data architecture and IT infrastructure which fully supports its risk data aggregation capabilities and risk reporting practices not only in normal times but also during times of stress or crisis, while still meeting the other
Q: Do you think the forecaster should distribute forecast accuracy to stakeholders (e.g. to show how good/bad the forecast is) or do you think this will confuse stakeholders? A: This just depends what is meant by stakeholders. And what is meant by forecast accuracy. If stakeholders means those people who
I enjoy blogging about new functionality in the SAS/IML language because I can go into more depth and provide more complicated examples than the SAS/IML documentation. Today's article is a summary of all of my posts about features that were added to SAS/IML 12.1, which shipped in August 2012 as
When you hear of a Scatter Plot or a Series Plot, you have a picture in your mind what we are talking about. But one of the plot statements available in GTL, and soon with SGPLOT, is the BLOCK plot. I am sure this leaves many users scratching their heads, wondering
In a pair of articles published in Foresight, and in his SAS/Foresight webinar "Avoidability of Forecast Error" last November, Steve Morlidge of CatchBull laid out a compelling new approach on the subject of "forecastability." It is generally agreed that the naive model (i.e. random walk or "no change" model) provides
In this tutorial video, you will learn to print a simple listing with Base SAS. You see how to write a PRINT procedure step to display a SAS data set. You also see how to use statements and options to subset observations and variables and enhance the report. Learn
Yesterday I blogged about the Hilbert matrix. The (i,j)th element of the Hilbert matrix has the value 1 / (i+j-1), which is the reciprocal of an integer. However, the printed Hilbert matrix did not look exactly like the formula because the elements print as finite-precision decimals. For example, the last
So far in this Ask the Statistician series, we heard statisticians at the Analytics 2013 conference discuss the benefits of statistical analysis, the types of statistical techniques they use to solve their business problems and how they share their statistical results with non-technical audiences that need to use this information. So, the next step
We sometimes describe the potential of big data analytics as letting the data tell its story, casting the data scientist as storyteller. While the journalist has long been a newscaster, in recent years the term data-driven journalism has been adopted to describe the process of using big data analytics to
The Hilbert matrix is the most famous ill-conditioned matrix in numerical linear algebra. It is often used in matrix computations to illustrate problems that arise when you compute with ill-conditioned matrices. The Hilbert matrix is symmetric and positive definite, properties that are often associated with "nice" and "tame" matrices. The
The volume is being turned up on the Control Tower approach to running a business; I have recently been introduced to logistics control towers, supply chain control towers and operations control towers just for starters. I’m sure there must be at least a half dozen more out there – pick
I enjoy reading the Graphically Speaking blog because it teaches me a lot about ODS statistical graphics, especially features of the SGPLOT procedure and the Graph Template Language (GTL). Yesterday Sanjay blogged about how to construct a stacked bar chart of percentages so that each bar represents 100%. His chart
With all the changes the Affordable Care Act brings, including new care and payment models, there is an increase in provider’s need for data. While some large health systems are able to learn much about a patient’s full course of treatment by integrating their systems, the majority of health care
Principle 1: Governance – A bank’s risk data aggregation capabilities and risk reporting practices should be subject to strong governance arrangements consistent with other principles and guidance established by the Basel Committee. My colleagues and I have written a series of posts on the principles of BCBS 239. In this
Did you know that SAS/IML 12.1 provides built-in functions that compute the norm of a vector or matrix? A vector norm enables you to compute the length of a vector or the distance between two vectors in SAS. Matrix norms are used in numerical linear algebra to estimate the condition
SAS Global Forum 2014 was a ton of fun, and extremely busy for yours truly. If you wonder how I spent my time at the conference, you need only to visit the on-demand video archive and see how many of the various sessions feature my shiny head. In most of
Are you wondering what to do next with your analytics program? The latest issue of sascom magazine provides a handy guide. Check it out to get help checking off must-do items like these: Establish an analytics center of excellence. Find out how SunTrust centralized all of the bank’s analytics teams –
