This week's SAS tip is from the new book Implementing CDISC Using SAS: An End-to-End Guide by Chris Holland and Jack Shostak. This comprehensive book will help anyone dealing with CDISC standards. Learn more about the book and the authors--plus get free content here. The following excerpt is from SAS Press authors Chris Holland and
Not everyone agrees on a definition of "big data" -- but you'll probably agree that the amount of data available today is a lot bigger than in the past, eh?!? ... so let's just call it "Bigger Data"! :) And you might have noticed that some of your old tried-and-true
Die Bedeutung von Daten und deren Auswertung wächst in jeder Branche – ebenso wie die Komplexität von Geschäftsprozessen und ihren wechselseitigen Abhängigkeiten zunimmt. Ob es um ein besseres Kundenverständnis geht, eine genauere Risikoberechnung oder eine Optimierung von Produktion und Logistik: der Erfolgsfaktor von morgen liegt in der Analyse der ständig
In the first post in this series, Seeing the Light: How SMBs are Using Data and Insights to Get Ahead, I shared the motivations that prompted three SMBs (BGF Industries, Oberweis Dairy and Twiddy & Company) to replace spreadsheets and intuition with a more sophisticated, analytics-driven approach. But what factors
When it comes to online customer data, marketers today have to balance a fine line between consumer privacy and effective marketing. The problem is that it’s quite easy for marketing to be intrusive, annoying and even creepy, so there is a risk that the abusers in our industry may prompt legislation
I am not a big fan of the macro language, and I try to avoid it when I write SAS/IML programs. I find that the programs with many macros are hard to read and debug. Furthermore, the SAS/IML language supports loops and indexing, so many macro constructs can be replaced
A Bar Line graph is commonly used in many domains. The SGPLOT procedure makes it easy to create bar line graphs where the user can customize it in many different ways. This post is prompted by a recent question on the communities page on creating such a graph, with one bar and
David Loshin (@davidloshin) on using analytics to pinpoint your best customers.
Writing, editing, galley proofs, indexing, cover design…it all takes time. The logistics of getting a book published can be tough when you’re sitting across the room from each other. What happens when you’re across the world from each other? That’s the topic of this month’s blog post. Technology makes the
If an organization is spending time and money to have a forecasting process, is it not reasonable to expect the process to make the forecast more accurate and less biased (or at least not make it any worse!)? But how would we ever know what the process is accomplishing? To
A regular reader noticed my post on initializing vectors by using repetition factors and asked whether that technique would be useful to expand data that are given in value-frequency pairs. The short answer is "no." Repetition factors are useful for defining (static) matrix literals. However, if you want to expand
Imagine a business offering a multitude of products and services that seemingly have little relationship to one another, and all are supported by different data systems. This is the plight of local governments. The products and services produced and managed by local governments range from utilities, solid waste and recycling to parks
Today is Father’s Day in the United States, so as I did on Mother’s Day with advice from moms, I gathered fatherly advice from my coworkers, and my friends and colleagues in other organizations to see if I could relate the words of wisdom to marketers. For some, the dads have chosen to
This week's SAS tip is from Art Carpenter and his latest book Carpenter's Guide to Innovative SAS Techniques. Art is a talented SAS user and prolific author--and was just recognized in the SAS Circle of Excellence for 30 years of using SAS software. After taking a look at this week's book
Big data. It’s still the hottest topic going – and making it pay off continues to be a challenge. According to a recent IDG Research survey, organizations’ biggest big data headaches are: 1) lack of skills needed to run analysis and 2) difficulty in making data available to users for
Are you invisible or remarkable? That's the question that Seth Godin believes that marketers should ask themselves in the new economy and there are 3 simple reasons why: All media is now optional - no one is going to look at your tweet or open your junk mail unless they
If you've watched any of the demos for SAS Visual Analytics (or even tried it yourself!), you have probably seen this nifty exploration of multiple measures. It's a way to look at how multiple measures are correlated with one another, using a diagonal heat map chart. The "stronger" the color
"Big data" is a big deal for electric utilities. In a smart power grid, when you turn on the lights, you're generating data. When your neighbor plugs in his electric vehicle, he's generating data. When a heat wave causes retailers to crank up the air conditioning, they're generating data. All
You might have seen my previous blog, where I plotted some interesting tourist attractions on a geographical map of the British Isles (which may be of interest to Analytics 2013 Conference delegates)... Well this blog uses even more powerful analytics, and shows how SAS can calculate the "optimal tour" to visit all
In a previous blog post, I described how to use a spread plot to compare the distributions of several variables. Each spread plot is a graph of centered data values plotted against the estimated cumulative probability. Thus, spread plots are similar to a (rotated) plot of the empirical cumulative distribution
Do we ever really get pricing right? Sometimes we do, and some of those times are actually on purpose, but it takes a lot of upstream activities to go right in order for pricing to be optimal as well. Too often pricing is that last variable at our disposal when
In Amsterdam, harnessing the power of the (data) tide With more than 100 km of canals and 1,500 bridges, dikes and dams, Amsterdam has long been in tune with the tides. Today, as an economic tide tugs at Europe and many regions, organizations are coping with a flood of data
David Loshin (@davidloshin) offers a new approach to addressing customer classification.
Suppose that you have several data distributions that you want to compare. Questions you might ask include "Which variable has the largest spread?" and "Which variables exhibit skewness?" More generally, you might be interested in visualizing how the distribution of one variable differs from the distribution of other variables. The
As part of my follow-up to SAS Global Forum 2013, I've posted a few articles about how to create your own client apps with SAS Integration Technologies. This article shows how to use Microsoft .NET -- the same approach used for SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office
Hi everyone! I'm excited to be a new contributer to this blog - I've taken the road less traveled when it comes to marketing. My goal out of college was to see the world which landed me in the travel industry. I later became a Certified Meeting Planner and Events Project Manager,
This week's SAS tip is from Michele Burlew and her book SAS Macro Programming Made Easy, Second Edition. Michele is the author of several extremely helpful SAS books. Visit her author page to learn more about her work and for additional free content. The following excerpt is from SAS Press
Are you going to Analytics 2013 in London?!? And if so, have you found any fun/interesting/touristy things to do while you're there? ... Being an analytics conference, I thought it would be good to apply some "analytics" to the task! So I took some locations in the British Isles that I thought
At a time when information is proliferating at an unprecedented rate, companies that can effectively gather, create and use information can gain dramatic market advantages over those that don’t. SMB Group’s 2012 Routes to Market Study shows that SMBs that have deployed business intelligence and analytics solutions are 51% more
Analytics 2013 is the educational conference for data analysts to learn about the latest technology and advances in the field of analytics. The next conference is set for June 19-20 in London, and I am excited to be attending this year. In fact, this will be my very first international
