The increasing use of predictive analytics in mission-critical business decisions and operations brings new challenges to the forefront for many of our customers. Throughout the last year I spoke to many customers about their use of predictive analytics and where they see areas of improvement to achieve even more success
Being that 2013 is the International Year of Statistics, I wanted to make sure everyone knows how to handle my favorite statistic - percent (%) - in SAS! I often see data in spreadsheets/csv/etc that purport to represent "percents"... but you have to be a bit careful when working with
The Institute of Business Forecasting has named Larry Lapide, Research Affiliate at MIT, as recipient of its "Lifetime Achievement in Business Forecasting & Planning" award -- a much deserved honor! Larry has written a quarterly column for Journal of Business Forecasting for 15 years, and I've been a longtime follower.
Sometimes a categorical variable has many levels, but you are only interested in displaying the levels that occur most frequently. For example, if you are interested in the number of times that a song was purchased on iTunes during the past week, you probably don't want a bar chart with
David Loshin's latest blog post: "Balancing Performance Measures for Data Accessibility using Data Federation."
I've bragged about how easy it is to install custom tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide. It's simple: you copy the .NET assembly (usually a single DLL file) into one of the designated folders in your SAS Enterprise Guide installation, and your task just shows up in the menu. Since I
The creation of Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) took off in 2009 with the establishment of the State Health Information Exchange Cooperative Agreement Program (SHIECAP). Recently, it seems like HIEs have been somewhat of the middle-child, garnering less attention between the health insurance exchanges and Medicaid expansion. But let’s take a
I am pleased to announce that this year at SAS Global Forum 2013 (San Francisco, April 27 to May 1, 2013) I am giving a free hands-on workshop (HOW) entitled "Getting Started with the SAS/IML Language." If you are not familiar with the very popular Hands-On Workshop series at SAS
OK, I promise this is the last article on Forest Plots (at least for a while). In the previous article on Subgrouped Forest Plot with Font Attributes, I discussed how to use bold text for subgroup headings. I mentioned that increasing the font size would not work as it would
Just a few days ago our "super-duper tech support trooper" called in asking for the link to the subgrouped Forest Plot with bold headings. She was referring to this Forest Plot with Subgroups I had posted earlier. However, as you can see, while the subgroup values are indented from the subgroup headers, the headers
Many of my blogging colleagues are taking this week to reflect on their top posts in 2012. Some are using the visitor statistics to rank the posts, but as Andy Ratcliffe points out, that gives short-shrift to the late-season articles. This year, I'm going to use this space to recap
In the spirit of the new year – the International Year of Statistics – I thought I’d share some different ways to use statistics. Can statistics help you in your everyday life? Certainly! And here's an example to prove it... Let's say you have a dresser drawer full of white socks.
It's midyear, and management has decided that a new publication is a great way to highlight the work of a group of people within the organization to external audiences. "We'll keep costs down by doing the design and layout ourselves. We just need to buy the software licenses." Money is
It's the start of a new year. Have you made a resolution to be a better data analyst? A better SAS statistical programmer? To learn more about multivariate statistics? What better way to start the New Year than to read (or re-read!) the top 12 articles for statistical programmers from
Look at what arrived in the mail room this morning! Of course, I was expecting it sometime in January...but not first thing! Here's to early deliveries...perhaps this will set the tone for all of my projects in the new year.
In part 1 of my thoughts about analytics maturity, I deferred talking about issues related to the actual assessment of your organization’s level. Today I intend to detail some of the ways my peers and I are thinking about analytical maturity, comment on scales in use today, and address some
The Lancaster Centre for Forecasting is led by two of my favorites in the forecasting world, Robert Fildes and Sven Crone. The Centre is home to cutting edge research and consulting, covering the range of forecasting models and methods, as well as real-world forecasting process. The Centre has announced a
Are you ready for the upcoming International Year of Statistics? I have prepared myself by doing a correspondence analysis. Excusez-moi? Correspondence analysis is a technique that has been very popular in France and is therefore sometimes referred to as French Statistics. Correspondence analysis is a technique for categorical data analysis.
I used "Dropbox" in the title for this post, but these techniques can be used for other cloud-based file sharing services, such as GitHub and Google Drive. Using PROC HTTP (added in SAS 9.2), you can easily access any "cloud-based" file as long as you have a public link to
Watching our nation approach the "fiscal cliff", and the dire predictions if we truly drive off it like the last scene in Thelma and Louise, has sharpened my view of the potential risks that huge gaps of fraud and abuse present to all of us. One of the key lessons
David Loshin's latest blog post: "Monitoring for Event Patterns."
'Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the world ... dot-matrix printers were humming as Santa's naughty/nice list was unfurled... Can you imagine what it must have been like years ago when Santa had to maintain his naughty/nice list by hand, with a feather quill pen?!? Or even these
Joyce Norris-Montanari declares this the perfect time to prepare your data for 2013. See what her plans entail.
The SGPANEL procedure is used to create panelled graphics based on classification variables. The panelled cells are generated starting from either the top left (the default) or the bottom left of the panel, controllable by the START option. Currently, the ordering of the cells is determined by two criteria: 1.
In my previous post, I described how to implement an iterated function system (IFS) in the SAS/IML language to draw fractals. I used the famous Barnsley fern example to illustrate the technique. At the end of the article I issued a challenge: can you construct an IFS whose fractal attractor
Police Departments across the country are under constant scrutiny by elected officials, the media and the public to reduce crime, control costs, engage the public, always be accessible and, most important, always be courteous and professional. Police departments that demonstrate excellence in these areas can achieve accreditation by The Commission
Fractals. If you grew up in the 1980s or '90s and were interested in math and computers, chances are you played with computer generation of fractals. Who knows how many hours of computer time was spent computing Mandelbrot sets and Julia sets to ever-increasing resolutions? When I was a kid,
Naomi Robbins has posted a contest, part 1 of which is to submit alternative representations for the following graph: Clearly, usage of two pie charts to represent the share of the B2B and B2C referrals will invite many responses. To create the graph, I took the data shown in the Pie Charts themselves, so we are using percent
Several years ago my mom, bless her heart, bought a cell phone. Now, my mom is not what one would call “tech-savvy”. She has had the same car forever, same furniture for 25 years (well, she did get it reupholstered), even the same pots and pans that came as wedding
