Tried, tested and true -- I’m sure you already practice some, if not all, of these efficient techniques to save resources. I recently shared these 10 techniques with the Wisconsin Illinois SAS users group in Milwaukee. The conference ran smoothly under the incredibly able guidance of Dr. LeRoy Bessler. I’ll
Jede Branche und jeder Fachbereich kann und wird von Analytics profitieren. Doch jeweils ein wenig anders. Wie Sie bislang ungenutzte Erkenntnispotenziale in ihren Datenbergen heben können, erfahren Sie am 11. und 12. September 2013 in Mannheim. Das SAS Forum 2013 ist nicht nur die größte, sondern auch die individuellste Konferenz
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;
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.)
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
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
