This week's tip is from Professor Willbann D. Terpening and his book Statistical Analysis for Business Using JMP. If you're intrigued by the following excerpt, visit Terpening's author page for additional bonus book content. And take a look at his previously featured tip The Student t-distribution, on this blog: The following excerpt is from
Jean Paul Isson (Global Vice President of Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics, Monster Worldwide, Inc.) and Jesse Harriott (Chief Analytics Officer, Constant Contact) know a thing or two about business analytics. With almost 40 years of experience between them, they've handled it all—from web mining solutions to business intelligence, predictive
What do disaster planning and baseball have in common? (Cue Cubs fans, "We plan on every season being a disaster!") Bear with me... Watching game 1 of the World Series reminded me of the time I took my son to AT&T Park to see the Giants play. It was the day
If you're like me, you hate all those pop-ups you get suggesting (or sometimes forcing) that you install an upgrade such as Windows, Java, browsers, phone apps, etc, etc. And quite often they don't convince you why you'd want to upgrade (will life be better?) ... they just tell you to
So this is my first blog entry relating to my book Customer Segmentation and Clustering Using SAS Enterprise Miner, Second Edition. If you’ve read or are reading my book, I sincerely hope it aids in your understanding of your customers, clients, patients, etc. I originally wrote this book because when
There are a lot of useful probability distributions that are not featured in standard statistical textbooks. Some of them have distinctive names. In the past year I have had contact with SAS customers who use the Tweedie distribution, the slash distribution, and the PERT distribution. Often these distributions are used
Categorical Data Analysis Using SAS has been a favorite among SAS Books readers for quite some time, both as a useful discussion of categorical data analysis techniques as well as an invaluable aid in applying these methods with SAS. Maura Stokes is lead author of the recently published third edition. I
While 2012 has been a very active hurricane season in terms of total storms, the effects on life and property have been relatively small and the need for disaster recovery less than many years. Let's all be thankful for that. Right now, Tropical Storm Sandy is threatening Jamaica and the
After installing SAS Business Intelligence, I would also suggest verifying that all is working appropriately before adding users or importing content from another machine. (My template checklist is included below.) The act of creating the content is an extremely important test (to immediately rectify issues with accessing data, or saving
What's in a name? As Shakespeare's Juliet said, "That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet." A similar statement holds true for the names of colors in SAS: "Rose" by any other name would look as red! SAS enables you to specify a
According to the Daily Writing Tips blog, describing a thing as "somewhat unique" is bad form. Unique means "one of a kind", so either it is or it is not. The famous example (which the style police will use to chide you) is that you can't have something as "somewhat
The first step is to answer the question of what “real-time” actually means. Depending on the program and industry speed of response, I’ve heard answers that varied from milliseconds for the biggest banks in processing credit card charges to 24 hours for some government programs. A better description of what
In 2011 I came across Shaun Snapp’s blog (scmfocus.com), and immediately took a liking. In particular, I was drawn to his independent and critical tone, and a willingness to challenge the “objectivity” of many commentators and advisors in the forecasting industry. He also takes a reasoned look at the common
We wrapped up the annual SESUG conference this week. This year was special, in that the conference was held locally near SAS world headquarters in Cary, NC. In fact, the opening session on Sunday was right here in our on-campus conference center. Conferees were able to take campus tours and
I’ve heard it said that the only thing you can count on in life is change. The same can be said of technology. Change is certain, and the rate of change seems to accelerate with each passing year. Change requires us to adapt, but as we race to keep up with
This week's SAS tip is from A. John Bailer and his book Statistical Programming in SAS. A Fellow of the American Statistical Association, John has been using SAS for 30 years. His expertise clearly comes through in his book. The following excerpt is from SAS Press author John Bailer and his book "Statistical Programming in SAS"
Jim Harris (@ocdqblog) explains the prediction he made about Small Data and VRM.
Program update for 2013! The SAS Training Roadshow is back on tour. This year, we’re heading out to six rockin’ cities. We’d love to see you there. Cleveland - St. Louis – Portland - San Jose - Indianapolis - Las Vegas. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In my previous post, I revealed my top
Sometimes a graph is more interpretable if you assign specific colors to categories. For example, if you are graphing the number of Olympic medals won by various countries at the 2012 London Olympics, you might want to assign the colors gold, silver, and bronze to represent first-, second-, and third-place
Living in the Washington, D.C. area I expect the morning news shows to spend a lot of time reporting on traffic. Crashes on the beltway, downed power lines delaying train service…that’s a normal day. D.C. is the most congested city, according to the Texas Transportation Institute’s annual report.). Commuting to
I've been finishing up just a bit of the "boilerplate" content for my forthcoming book about custom tasks. One of the final tasks is to write the introduction, also known as the "About this Book" section. SAS Press offers a template with examples of a few essential topics to address
Last week I provided the steps for how to go on a date, at least by using dynamic prompts in BI Dashboard. Now that you have seen how to create them, lets discuss making them smarter. For this example, the customer is asking for two prompts to affect a single
The New York Times has an excellent staff that produces visually interesting graphics for the general public. However, because their graphs need to be understood by all Times readers, the staff sometimes creates a complicated infographic when a simpler statistical graph would show the data in a clearer manner. A
Andy Pulkstenis of State Farm thinks it is, stating that this red-headed stepchild among modeling technques is where predictive modeling was ten years ago. He opened his talk, "Do You Know or Do You Think You Know? Creating a Testing Culture at State Farm," at the A2012 conference in Las Vegas with
This week's SAS tip comes from Frederick Pratter and his book Web Development with SAS by Example, Third Edition. Frederick's book contains a wealth of good information, including the following excerpt. The following excerpt is from SAS Press author Frederick Pratter and his book "Web Development with SAS by Example,
You've all heard about the recent meningitis outbreak, right? Being a data-guy and a map-guy, I went looking for maps related to the outbreak. I found the following map on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website. It shows the states that received the recalled drug used in epidurals (for back
Sunny days, keeping the clouds away, can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?? Oops, sorry, was just day dreaming about younger days and the magic of an eight foot talking yellow bird. How great was Sesame Street? I learned counting, my abc’s, sharing, diversity,
The Premier Business Leadership Series (PBLS) was in full swing on day one with the astute and provocative keynote address, "Prosperity at Risk," by the prolific Michael E. Porter, an internationally known competitive strategist and professor at the Harvard Business School. His tome On Competition is a resourceful compendium for the
The Analytics conference has just concluded and the unofficial theme of the final day was Big Data. It began with our very first talk, a keynote presentation delivered by Will Hakes, CEO and co-founder of Link Analytics. Will spent the first part of his talk outlining the current state of
Program update for 2013! The SAS Training Roadshow is back on tour. This year, we’re heading out to six rockin’ cities. We’d love to see you there. Cleveland - Portland - San Jose - Indianapolis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ As I prepare for my stint on the SAS Programming "Roadshow," it occurs to
