Retail is one of the most time-sensitive industries. Find out how mega-chain Family Dollar Stores Inc., which operates more than 7,400 stores in 45 states, relies on high-performance analytics to shrink data processing windows from days to less than an hour and speed decision making. Scott Zucker, Vice President of
Being a Hollywood celebrity means plenty of perks in addition to willing groupies. For example, the 2012 Oscars Nominee Gift Bag (valued at over $62,000) included a 5-day elephant safari in Botswana ($15,580), Eminence organic body scrub (with virgin coconut oil and raw sugar cane, $48), Naughty Bits Brownies ($50), and a
SAS Server Pages were initially described in my SAS Press book Building Web Applications with SAS/IntrNet: A Guide to the Application Dispatcher . The creation of SAS Server Pages was accomplished through the use of a DATA step and the RESOLVE function. SAS Server Pages have been used by a
Last week I blogged about how to construct a smoother for a time series for the temperature in Albany, NY from 1995 to March, 2012. I smoothed the data by "folding" the time series into a single "year" that contains repeated measurements for each day of the year. Experts in
The birthday matching problem is a classic problem in probability theory. The part of it that people tend to remember is that in a room of 23 people, there is greater than 50% chance that two people in the room share a birthday. But the birthday matching problem is also
The first line of this week's SAS tip grabs your attention, "PROC SQL provides a helpful (though potentially dangerous) tool in the form of the DESCRIBE TABLE statement." SAS author, consultant, and member of the SAS-L Hall of Fame Howard Schreier included this intriguing statement in his book PROC SQL by Example: Using
The INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research kicks off April 15 in Huntington Beach, CA. I had a chance to preview a presentation by Glenn Bailey, Sr. Director of Operations Research at Manheim (the $3B wholesaler auto auctioneer). Glenn's talk is on "The Need for Speed: Responsive Predictive Analytics,"
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I am sharing best practices that I learned from talking to education customers about successful implement ions of information management, reporting and analytics at their K-12 school district or higher education institutions. In that first post, we learned about the importance of securing executive
In yesterday's post, I discussed a "quick and dirty" method to smooth periodic data. However, after I smoothed the data I remarked that the smoother itself was not exactly periodic. At the end points of the periodic interval, the smoother did not have equal slopes and the method does not
Over at the SAS and R blog, Ken Kleinman discussed using polar coordinates to plot time series data for multiple years. The time series plot was reproduced in SAS by my colleague Robert Allison. The idea of plotting periodic data on a circle is not new. In fact it goes
Usually I like to write a blog at the end of the year with a top 10 list of most popular classes or most read blogs for that year. Somehow I forgot to do that at the end of 2011, so here I am writing this blog today. I figured
When it refers to the number of new SAS Press books headed your way before SAS Global Forum! SAS Authors and the SAS Press Team have been working day and night to bring you 13 new titles in time for SAS Global Forum at the end of April. Pictured are
Over at the SAS Discussion Forums, someone asked how to use SAS to fit a Poisson distribution to data. The questioner asked how to fit the distribution but also how to overlay the fitted density on the data and to create a quantile-quantile (Q-Q) plot. The questioner mentioned that the
In September 2010, I questioned whether you should care about native 64-bit client applications (or the lack thereof). At the time, SAS did not have a 64-bit version of SAS Enterprise Guide or SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. A skeptical reader might assume that I was just trying to make
Do you enjoy recalling your first SAS encounter almost as much as a first date? If so, you’re not alone. Before picking up the phone to call me, however, consider eavesdropping on some recent SAS users’ conversations—and then share your own story. Last week, members of our Fans of SAS Books
I can’t believe all that has happened in the 7 months since I last blogged about high-performance analytics, so I’m back to give you some updates from SAS R&D. The energy around this area keeps growing as more of our developers adopt the new high-performance architecture and target their developments
Locating missing values is important in statistical data analysis. I've previously written about how to count the number of missing values for each variable in a data set. In Base SAS, I showed how to use the MEANS or FREQ procedures to count missing values. In the SAS/IML language, I
Today, SAS announces a new addition to its global certification program: you can now become "SAS Versions"-certified. Over the past 36 years, SAS has delivered hundreds of software products to the business analytics marketplace. Each of those products has a version number. As new revisions are released, the combination of
The title of this week's SAS author's tip amuses me. My non-programming mind is conjuring up a seriously cool PROC that leaps off the page. Or something like that. In reality, when looking for a potential tip in Wendy Bohnenkamp's and Jackie Iverson's book SAS Graphics for Java, I spotted many intriguing-looking graphs. Written for programmers
A 23-year Harvard and Columbia University study was recently published shedding new light on the long-term impacts of teachers with both high and low value-added estimates. Researchers Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff tracked math and reading assessment data on over 2.5 million students from 1989-2009. They then incorporated 90% of these
Let's end 2012-Q1 with a graphic editorial comment: Forecast Accuracy vs. Effort Using a naïve model will achieve a certain level of forecast accuracy. That accuracy may be high if the demand is smooth and stable, or low if the demand is erratic. But you achieve this level of accuracy with virtually no
In a previous post I showed how to implement Stewart's (1980) algorithm for generating random orthogonal matrices in SAS/IML software. By using the algorithm, it is easy to generate a random matrix that contains a specified set of eigenvalues. If D = diag(λ1, ..., λp) is a diagonal matrix and
The March 28 edition of APICS extra features an article by Fred Tolbert on "The Seven Deadly Sins of Sales Forecasting." Although I have some objection to his Deadly Sin #1: Using Shipment History (and will discuss the objection in a forthcoming guest-post on the Institute of Business Forecasting blog),
The bookstore is a happening place at SAS Global Forum. You can shop onsite and save money on books, mingle with 30+ SAS authors, try to win giveaways (hint: follow @SASPublishing on Twitter and monitor the SAS Global Forum hashtag #SASGF12 and/or enter a couple of surveys) and chat with
Mikhail Semeniuk, Director of Analytics at TrueCar, will explain why his company turned to SAS for an analytics solution that didn't require a large staff but was flexible enough to grow with the company, and powerful enough to better manage data and create fast, accurate forecasts. Mikhail works on the
Even Rod Serling recognized that sometimes we can't forecast worth a darn. "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" is an episode from Season 2 of the television series, The Twilight Zone, and first aired in 1961. It involves four train robbers who steal a million dollars worth of gold bars, hide
In my last blog post I revealed the WOW factor of SAS Visual Analytics. In summary: analyzing billions of rows of data, across vast numbers of columns, via 100+ correlation calculations in SECONDS (wow). What exactly does that mean? SAS Visual Analytics takes full advantage of SAS’ high-performance analytics technology.
When you begin your career your most important skills are your hard, technical skills; the finance and accounting, the statistics and economics, the physics and chemistry, the engineering and calculus. But as I tell my business school mentees, as your career progresses, the emphasis changes such that much sooner than
Because I am writing a new book about simulating data in SAS, I have been doing a lot of reading and research about how to simulate various quantities. Random integers? Check! Random univariate samples? Check! Random multivariate samples? Check! Recently I've been researching how to generate random matrices. I've blogged
With the publication of JSL Companion: Applications of the JMP Scripting Language, by Theresa Utlaut, Georgia Morgan, and Kevin Anderson, novice scripters now have a resource that helps them go beyond the basics of the JMP Scripting Language (JSL). Why JSL? The authors have the answers: 1. Easy to start
