Math and analytics are back “in vogue,” says Kathy Lange, member of the Americas Business Analytics practice at SAS. Since she was little, Kathy has seen the world as one big math problem, and her devotion to mathematics is overwhelmingly clear in this lively interview. Read on below, and be
We're working on a project with a retail industry thought leadership organization called Retail Systems Research (RSR for short). My colleague, Wilson Raj, is working with RSR Managing Partner Nikki Baird to explore how data-driven customer centricity holds the key to successful omni-channel retailing. Omni-channel retailing is a concept that applies
This week's SAS tip comes from superstar blogger Rick Wicklin and his book Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software. You can learn more about Rick, read user reviews of his book and a free chapter, as well as sign up to receive notification of availability of his forthcoming book Simulating Data with SAS --by visiting his author page.
Last week in my post, Revenue Management vs. Price Optimization: Part One, I explored the practice of practice of hospitality revenue management, its origins in the airlines and how it was changed for use in the hospitality industry. This week I will explore how price optimization has evolved and how
Around the country and in my neighborhood, kids everywhere have returned to school. We’ve made it through the back-to-school ads in our newspapers, social media, and on TV. Our pocket books are lighter now (and credit cards heavier) with all the spending on school supplies and the very important back-to-school
A while back, I had seen the following map on the CEOs for Cities website. It seemed like an interesting topic and an interesting map, but I just couldn't grok what their map was saying ... So I decided to download the data and create my own map with SAS. I
Ah! The joys of sets! It is easy to test whether two vectors are equal in SAS/IML software. It is only slightly more challenging to test whether two sets are equal. Recall that A and B are equal as sets if they contain the same elements. Order does not matter.
Ever since the term "big data" has popped up as a hot topic, you may have also heard about this "new" role called the data scientist. This is an important role that helps derive insight out of any sized data by applying knowledge about analytics to help solve business problems. I would argue that
I needed to construct a string to use in the title of a scatter plot. The scatter plot showed a line, and I wanted to include the equation of the line in the plot's title. This article shows how to construct a string that contains the equation in a readable
It has become more and more apparent, country by country and state by state, that many organizations do not have a clear grasp on what their exposure is to health care fraud. Whatever name it goes by – aberrant behavior, abuse, waste or fraud – and no matter how it is measured – in currency (dollars,
SAS users world-wide have turned to Susan Slaughter, Lora Delwiche, and The Little SAS Book to learn SAS programming. This week's SAS tip is from their bestselling fourth edition of the book (the fifth edition is now available for preorder). Whichever version of The Little SAS Book you use, you'll benefit from the friendly
One of the often-cited side effects of moving from "Base SAS" (SAS on your PC, or Display Manager) to SAS Enterprise Guide is the loss of "X" command privileges -- that is, the ability for your SAS programs to invoke other programs via the operating system shell. We call this
Wondering why technology is such a big deal and why working with SAS will be in demand forever? The great blackout of Toronto in 2003 proved that so well. We could barely survive without electricity for a whole day. While breakdowns make us acutely aware of our dependence, technology also
According to Wikipedia, "Innovation is the creation of better or more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments, and society. Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a better and, as a result, novel idea or method, whereas
Here at the Analytic Hospitality Executive, we are often asked the question “How is price optimization different from revenue management?” It’s a simple question that has become increasingly difficult to answer – largely due to the evolution of revenue management practices, and the very definition of revenue management. In this
Magic squares are cool. Algorithms that create magic squares are even cooler. You probably remember magic squares from your childhood: they are n x n matrices that contain the numbers 1,2,...,n2 and for which the row sum, column sum, and the sum of both diagonals are the same value. There are many
For Insurers, social media is no longer just for marketing. As Hurricane Isaac threatens in the Gulf of Mexico, many proactive insurance companies are using social media to communicate with customers; offering insight on preparing for the storm, tracking the radar, and offering instructions on how to file a storm-related
Christian Haxholdt, an analytics consultant in Global Professional Services and Delivery, has a passion for probability. Originally from Denmark, Christian is a former professor of statistics, and although he no longer teaches, he’s still an avid learner. Read on for his spirited interview, and be sure to check out the
Have you ever tried to put something on the Web, and then it looks different for other people (or maybe doesn't work at all)? ... And you eventually found that it was because they were using a different browser? That's one of the reasons I like traditional SAS/Graph output -- it's simple
“Ohio links teacher pay to test scores” was the headline of a recent CNN School of Thought blog. Yikes! With a headline like that, teachers might start heading for the hills. I kept reading through the blog hoping that it would better explain Ohio’s policy to use student growth data
Edward Vonesh is a managing member of Vonesh Statistical Consulting, LLC, as well as a part-time employee of Northwestern University, where he supports research in his capacity as professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine. Needless to say, he knows a thing or two about generalized linear and nonlinear models.
The Perils Revisited A few posts ago I warned of the perils of forecasting benchmarks, and why they should not be used to set your forecasting performance objectives: Can you trust the data? Is measurement consistent across the respondents? Is the comparison relevant? In addition to a general suspicion about
When I studied math in school, I learned that the expression a (mod n) is always an integer between 0 and q – 1 for integer values of a and q. It's a nice convention, but SAS and many other computer languages allow the result to be negative if a (or q) is
My colleague Matt Fulk and I were looking for a follow up to our white paper, Lead Management Automation Using SAS, which covered our evolution with marketing analytics. One initiative that has really been rewarding to work on has been the internal implementation of our Customer Experience Analytics solution. For me,
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. He's also Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Statistics at Miami University. To read a free chapter and user reviews
What were we blogging about last year at this time? Some of our bloggers were attending a leadership conference in Singapore and others were attending an analytics conference at Disney. It may surprise you to know we were already talking about high-performance analytics. In fact, we were talking about high-performance
Leaving Las Vegas Prince Harry, who recently gambled away a handful of the royal family jewels during a high-stakes billiards game, doesn't have to be the only person to leave Las Vegas with some important lessons learned. You can, too, by attending the Analytics2012 conference at Caesar's Palace, October 8-9. Learnings
Here's what usually happens: You attend a conference and decide to live blog a session or two. You might even pre-draft or pre-research a small portion of the post to include the names of the speakers and some background information about them. Typically, you start the post like this: I
At the end of 2011, we ranked the most viewed SAS Documentation titles of the year. Now, as the second quarter has closed, we’ve analyzed traffic to SAS Documentation pages again. While the results are very similar to the previously featured 10 most popular SAS Documentation titles of 2011, there
Regular expressions provide a powerful method to find patterns in a string of text. However, the syntax for regular expressions is somewhat cryptic and difficult to devise. This is why, by my reckoning, approximately 97% of the regular expressions used in code today were copied and pasted from somewhere else.
