If you are looking to find a job in business forecasting, or trying to fill one, there are many online resources available: Professional Organizations Institute of Business Forecasting & Planning - Very active searchable list of currently available jobs in forecasting and planning, from entry level to executive. Employers post
Every programming language has an IF-THEN statement that branches according to whether a Boolean expression is true or false. In SAS, the IF-THEN (or IF-THEN/ELSE) statement evaluates an expression and braches according to whether the expression is nonzero (true) or zero (false). The basic syntax is if numeric-expression then do-computation;
If, like me, you have children who are old enough to vote, you may have noticed what I have noticed. They’re different. They seem permanently connected to their friends via social media, rarely watch the news or read a paper, and they have many transient interests that seem to follow
Q: Is the MAPE of the naive forecast the basis for understanding the forecastability of the behavior? Or are there other more in depth ways to measure the forecastability of a behavior? MAPE of the naive forecast indicates the worst you should be able to forecast the behavior. You can
On the Web site for the book Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software, I provide instructions on how to download the sample data sets and install them so that they can be used from within SAS/IML Studio. When I wrote the book I did not anticipate that SAS users might want
Malcolm Gladwell, writer for The New Yorker and the best-selling author of Blink and The Tipping Point, delivered an excellent closing speech at the Premier Business Leadership Series in Amsterdam, with his cautionary tale on the possible effects of having "perfect information." The bestselling author talked about the dangers of expert failure, and the
There are big opportunities in store for business in Brian Solis’ vision of the future, just as there are equally big opportunities for customers. They emanate from the importance of shared experiences, taking place with connected customers and which are fueled by great technologies. As is often the case, these
Inspired by the JMP blog - Statisticians: harbingers of doom?: Enjoy what's left of the International Year of Statistics -- while you still can.
Q: Company always try to forecast 12 or 24m ahead. Whether we should track accuracy of 1m/3m/ 6m or x month forecast, does that depend on lead time? How to determine out of these 12/24 months, which month should we track accuracy? Correct, forecast performance is usually evaluated against the
As I wrote in my previous post, a SAS customer noticed that he was getting some duplicate values when he used the RAND function to generate a large number of random uniform values on the interval [0,1]. He wanted to know if this result indicates a bug in the RAND
When I work on SAS projects that create lots of files as results, it's often a requirement that those files be organized in a certain folder structure. The exact structure depends on the project, but here's an example: /results |__ html |__ images |__ xls |__ data Before you can
The path to innovation isn’t canned. It’s not formulaic. It involves taking calculated risks and (as much as I hate this cliché) out-of-the-box thinking. It involves creativity and the eagerness to explore ideas. Notice I didn’t say new ideas. Sometimes innovation is more about re-purposing or reworking old ideas into
David Loshin (@davidloshin) on naming conventions for naming things.
Q: What is a legitimate goal to expect from your FVA...5%, 10%? Q: How do we set Target FVA which Forecasters can drive towards? The appropriate goal is to do no worse than a naive model, that is FVA ≥ 0. Sometimes, especially over short periods of time, you may
The future of business will require new success metrics. Since the future of business has been established by Brian Solis as being about shared experiences with connected customers enabled by great technologies, the next logical question might be whether or not those same technologies afford the ability to get new
Tossing dice is a simple and familiar process, yet it can illustrate deep and counterintuitive aspects of random numbers. For example, if you toss four identical six-sided dice, what is the probability that the faces are all distinct, as shown to the left? Many people would guess that the probability
Brian Solis has a vision of the future that involves shared experiences - many, many shared experiences. And his message for marketers is pretty clear - focus on shared experiences because that's what really matters. That's a pretty bold statement, but he backs it up with a rationale that's so simple and
Please enjoy a much-needed break from FVA Q&A with editor Len Tashman's preview of the Summer 2013 issue of Foresight: Enlightenment has been our guiding principle through this, our 30th issue of Foresight. Since the journal’s inception in 2005, our mission has been to help the forecasting profession come to
This week's SAS tip is from Phil Holland and his book Saving Time and Money Using SAS. Besides being a popular author, Phil is a frequent speaker at conferences around the globe and an active participant in online communities. If you're on LinkedIn, look for him on SAS Professional Forum
Many SAS Enterprise Guide users practically live in the Query Builder. For those who understand their data tables, the Query Builder provides a tremendous amount of flexibility to pull and manipulate data. The Query Builder produces SQL programs behind the scenes, which translates well for database-centric work. Sometimes a complex
Those of you who read these posts regularly might remember I planned to attend Analytics 2013 in London. I did get to attend, and am back in the states (though not fully adjusted to the Eastern time zone). This was a wonderful conference. Three great keynote presentations, over 40 analytical
With this Q&A Part 3, we are about halfway through the questions submitted during the FVA webinar. We did over 15 minutes of live Q&A at the end of the webinar, and covered many of the submitted questions at that time, however I always prefer to issue complete written responses to
The CLUSTER procedure in SAS/STAT software creates a dendrogram automatically. The black-and-white dendrogram is nice, but plain. A SAS customer wanted to know whether it is possible to add color to the dendrogram to emphasize certain clusters. For example, the plot at the left emphasizes a four-cluster scenario for clustering
Brian Solis of the Altimeter Group envisions a future brimming with potential, and a key part of his vision of the future are connected customers. These people are connected thanks to amazing technologies that enable the shared experience to take center stage, and for which new measures of success highlight many big opportunities. The connected
Q: Could you send me the presentation? With audio if possible. If you'd like a pdf of the slides, email me directly: mike.gilliland@sas.com For the audio, the webinar recording is available for free on-demand review: FVA: A Reality Check on Forecasting Practices Q: Can we get the case study referred here
Call SAS and you’ll be connected to a real person. That value is important to us. Visit any SAS user event and you’ll meet employees genuinely interested in listening to customer feedback ... employees from every division, even from the internal groups like Research & Development. Capturing customer feedback is
How do you count the number of unique rows in a matrix? The simplest algorithm is to sort the data and then iterate down the rows, comparing each row with the previous row. However, this algorithm has two shortcomings: it physically sorts the data (which means that the original locations
Brian Solis of the Altimeter Group has a compelling vision of the future - one which is replete with promise made possible by great technologies. But these great technologies come with a need to keep them in the right perspective (more on that below). In addition to great technologies, his vision of the future includes
As promised in yesterday's Foresight-SAS sponsored webinar on "Forecast Value Added: A Reality Check on Forecasting Practices," here is Part 1 of my written response to the over 25 questions that were submitted during the event. (Note: It may take a week or so to get through all of them.)
Engineers who implement process control can use analytics to think outside the of box. Better yet, they can use analytics to help solve the issues and risks associated with being inside the box or outside the box in the first place. Read on to learn what box I'm referring to
