In the past few weeks I have presented training sessions on data governance, master data management, data quality and analytics at three different venues. At each one of these events, during one of the breaks a variety of people in my course noted that the technical concepts of implementing programs
It was a case of life imitating art—the fine art of SAS programming, that is! I had arranged the perfect 4-day weekend. I would take the train to Philadelphia on Saturday. Run the Philadelphia Marathon on Sunday. Visit with my friend Frank DiIorio and his wife April on Monday. And
Wir stellen hier nur einen Auszug unseres Fazits aus einem Jahr "Mehr Wissen" Blog vor - aber wir teilen auch gerne die vollständige Auswertung. Bevorzugt mit Betreibern eines Corporate Blogs im Austausch mit ihren Erfahrungen. Aber jeder kann sich die Auswertung bestellen und ist eingeladen die Ergebnisse mit uns zu diskutieren.
If there's anyone who represents the global nature of SAS software, it's Falko Schulz. He's a German who lives in Brisbane, Australia while he works for SAS R&D based in Cary, NC. Falko works on the team that produces SAS Visual Analytics, specifically the "explorer" portion of the tool. He
The farther you try to forecast into the future, the less certain you are -- how can you represent that graphically? One way is to draw a shaded/colored "confidence interval" around your forecast line, but this is something a lot of SAS users have trouble with. That's why I decided to create
SAS Visual Analytics is so easy to use – even a fifth-grader can do it! Take a look at Emily Short’s Visual Analytics demo that she put together for her school project. (Her dad, Nick Short, is a Sales Manager at SAS) Isn’t she adorable? Now that you see
This has not yet been publicly announced, but I’m too excited to keep it a secret. SAS recently created a new division devoted exclusively to customer support. The division’s name is Customer Engagement and Support (CES); its leader is Fritz Lehman and it consists of four divisions: Publications, Education, Technical
This is the time of year when we like to make predictions about the upcoming year. Although I am optimistic about the potential of predictive analytics in the era of big data, I am also realistic about the nature of predictability regardless of how much data is used. For example, in
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, Last year a fractal made thee! O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, A heat map can display thee! O tree of green, adorned with lights! A trunk of brown, the rest is white. O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, A heat map can display
Why San Francisco? The Golden Gate Bridge. The Aquarium of the Bay. The best Ramen Noodles. Need more? Our Business knowledge Series offers you four more great reasons to visit San Francisco soon. Data Mining Techniques: Theory and Practice Customer Segmentation Using SAS Enterprise Miner SAS Functions by Example Survival
In my last post I introduced the term “behavior architecture,” and this time I would like to explore what that concept means. One approach is to start with the basics: given a business process with a set of decision points and a number of participants, the behavior architecture is the
The "Internet of Things" is the latest buzzword characterizing the machine-generated big data that has outstripped our ability to derive value from it. Think of UPS delivering 16 million packages every day through various hubs and all the logistics and decisioning that goes into that. But how does an organization
This week's SAS tip is from Rick Wicklin and his powerful new book Simulating Data with SAS. Rick is a principal researcher in computational statistics at SAS, where he develops and supports the IML procedure and the SAS/IML Studio application. Chances are you're already familiar with Rick's work - whether you've seen him
As I crossed the finished line, I could feel the tears welling up. “Don’t do it," I thought. "Athletes don’t cry." Somehow, I managed to pull myself together, but instead of my usual post-race celebration of high fives and cheering on other runners, I walked to the race result board
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” We all remember that famous quote from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and can probably relate to it. In the chaos of trying to find time for everything life throws at you
Recently a SAS/IML programmer asked a question regarding how to perform matrix arithmetic when some of the data are in vectors and other are in matrices. The programmer wanted to add the following matrices: The problem was that the numbers in the first two matrices were stored in vectors. The
While fancy new forecasting models will always be of interest to researchers, there is plenty of really interesting and practical new work being led by forecasting practitioners. Last month Steve Morlidge (who spent 30 years at Unilever, now with CatchBull), shared his promising new approach on the “Avoidability of Forecast
Text (aka unstructured) data is real, it’s huge, and it’s rapidly building up (both internally – at your company, and externally – on the web). You’ll only see more in the days to come. And guess what? If you are practicing traditional analytics at your company, foraying into unstructured data
Data on punched-cards, SAS software delivered on tape, jobs in the queue on the mainframe, printouts on green-bar paper ... we really appreciate all our SAS users, but if any of the above are part of your "SAS memories" we especially appreciate you! I guess I'm a computer geek, because
Last week I covered some of the interesting graph-related papers presented at WUSS. There were quite a few, so I broke up the report into two parts. Here is the second installment. In the paper Creating Graphical Patient Profiles using SAS by William Garner of Gilead Sciences, the author describes how to create
On any given day, on an average, good programmers spend maybe about 10-20% of their time writing code. And the remaining 90% thinking, researching, and experimenting to find the best design. With so much thinking time, they need every bit of help to reduce the amount of typing time. Not-so-good
Our blog editor extraordinaire Shelly Goodin brings you tips and information on technical content from our books that you can use immediately in your work. But what if you’re not there yet? What if you want to start with a 50,000-foot level view of analytics overall? Or learn how forecasting
For decades, data quality experts have been telling us poor quality is bad for our data, bad for our decisions, bad for our business and just plain all around bad, bad, bad – did I already mention it’s bad? So why does poor data quality continue to exist and persist?
A heat map is a graphical representation of a matrix that uses colors to represent values in the matrix cells. Heat maps often reveal the structure of a matrix. There are three common applications of visualizing matrices with heat maps: Visualizing a correlation or covariance matrix reveals relationships between variables.
My oh my… It makes me happy to see that most of our blog readers have been very good this year. You know, the elves have been especially busy keeping track of predicting the probability that you will be naughty or nice. This really cuts down on the last minute
This blog shows several "graphical analytics" examples, using holiday-related data... Since we're in the holiday season, I thought I would pull together several examples of my SAS graphs & maps of holiday-related topics (similar to my holiday blog in 2012, if you're a "long term follower"). Some are nice/technical examples, and
When learning a new language, it is important to learn to interpret error messages that come from the language's parser or compiler. Three years ago I blogged about how to interpret SAS/IML error messages. However, many questions have been posted to the SAS/IML Support Community that indicate that some people
This week’s SAS tip is from the fabulous Chris Hemedinger and his latest book Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide Using Microsoft .NET. Many of you are already familiar with Chris—whether you read his blog The SAS Dummy, hear him speak at conferences, or use his very helpful books. After
Liebe Blog-Leser, schon sind wir wieder mitten drin in dieser so besinnlichen, feierlichen und staden Vorweihnachtszeit, wo die meisten Menschen vor lauter Hektik nicht wissen, wo ihnen der Kopf steht. Jahresabschlüsse sind zu machen, Geschenke noch zu besorgen. Die Menschen um einen herum sind gereizt – und nach ehrlicher Selbstbeobachtung
As the International Year of Statistics comes to a close, I've been reflecting on the role statistics plays in our modern society. Of course, statistics provides estimates, forecasts, and the like, but to me the great contribution of statistics is that it enables us to deal with uncertainty in a
