SAS Global Forum 2012 is fast approaching and attendees want to make sure they make the most of their time away from their job. In addition to the opportunity to network with thousands of SAS professionals, attend hands-on workshops and demonstrations and choose from more than 300 paper presentations, attendees
After unwittingly getting involved recently in a code vs GUI discussion another pro GUI vote came in yesterday when presenting to a customer's internal user group. When creating and using prompts in SAS Enterprise Guide, it is a no-brainer to recommend leveraging the %_eg_WhereParam as it handles all the special
Most statistical programmers have seen a graph of a normal distribution that approximates a binomial distribution. The figure is often accompanied by a statement that gives guidelines for when the approximation is valid. For example, if the binomial distribution describes an experiment with n trials and the probability of success
In my role at SAS I have the great fortune to meet with business intelligence and analytic (BI&A) teams all across the United States to share and discuss best practices and pain points, particularly around the ability to execute and operationalize insight internally and externally throughout the organization. In these
In this informative webcast, professors Jay Coleman and Mike DuMond discuss the 2012 Dance Card, revealing this year’s accuracy rate in predicting at-large selections to the Men’s Division I NCAA Tournament. The professors review the top 70 teams in the Dance Card, identify one team that may indicate a conference
If you're interested in more white board art and more discussions about high-performance analytics, I have a good list of links for you here. SAS' roving reporter Anna Brown was in San Francisco last week at Predictive Analytics World, and she found a lot of people to talk to about
If you like college basketball and the bracketology talk around the NCAA Tournament, you don’t want to miss an in-depth webcast with Dance Card professors Jay Coleman and Mike DuMond, taped earlier this morning. The professors discuss the 2012 Dance Card accuracy, the methodology behind the Dance Card, and identifying
Did you oversleep this morning? If you live in the United States of America, Monday morning seems to have arrived just a bit earlier, accompanied by a bit more "dark" than usual. That's because as good time-fearing citizens, we have all set our clocks ahead by one hour so as
SAS provides several ways to compute sample quantiles of data. The UNIVARIATE procedure can compute quantiles (also called percentiles), but you can also compute them in the SAS/IML language. Prior to SAS/IML 9.22 (released in 2010) statistical programmers could call a SAS/IML module that computes sample quantiles. With the release
What is the solution for patient-centric healthcare? Big data, says SAS expert Alice Swearington in the post, Treat patients with big data insights. "Service providers throughout the healthcare continuum that become patient centric first will win the patient," she explains, citing the industry tends toward insurance exchanges and retail insurance
This week I attended the inaugural Insurance and Finance SAS User Group conference at the SAS Headquarters in Cary, NC. The two-day conference was well attended by 80 members of our insurance and financial services customer community, and attendees were treated to a variety of presentations focused on these industry
At Predictive Analytics World San Francisco this week I attended back to back sessions on econometrics, a word that doesn’t surface as often as I think it should. Bestselling books like Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything or Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our
This week's tip comes from three authors who've made a big impact within the SAS user community. Lauren Haworth, Cynthia Zender, and Michele Burlew partnered up to write Output Delivery System: The Basics and Beyond a couple of years ago-and their book remains a bestselling go-to guide for anyone wanting to learn more about ODS.
How can big data coupled with high-performance analytics (HPA) help retail companies tailor their offerings in a way that is beneficial to both the company’s bottom line – and the consumer? Eric Williams, recently retired Chief Information Officer at Catalina Marketing, explains in this interview. Alison Bolen: How do you define
In the United States, this upcoming weekend is when we turn our clocks forward one hour as we adopt daylight saving time. (Some people will also flip their mattresses this weekend!) Daylight saving time (DST) in the US begins on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first
Apparently the prolonged use of OxyContin will give you a pompous and surley demeanor, and make you say a lot of really ignorant things. So I implore you, dear readers, to withhold your use of such a substance, preserve your good attitude and brain cells, and participate in a research study
What channels do marketers think are important? Which do they think are good? What new technologies are they focused on? And how are they getting to grips with Social Media? This was the theme of a webinar I participated in last week, hosted by Marketing Week (the leading marketing publication
A few years ago I had the privilege of presenting the last technical paper at SAS Global Forum. This year, conference chair Andy Kuligowski asked me to go one better than that, and present a talk at the official Closing Session. What will I talk about? That's a mystery (maybe
During IFSUG yesterday, Sunil Gupta gave attendees to his presentation a special homework assignment. Look into the SAS Enterprise Guide task 'Characterize Data'. Sunil suggested that this was a simple approach to quickly getting a summary of all the variables within your data table. Of course, some programmers will use
I work with continuous distributions more often than with discrete distributions. Consequently, I am used to thinking of the quantile function as being an inverse cumulative distribution function (CDF). (These functions are described in my article, "Four essential functions for statistical programmers.") For discrete distributions, they are not. To quote
Today at IFSUG, Chuck Patridge presented a wonderful talk about how to complete fuzzy matching using BASE SAS tools. Chuck has been programming SAS since 1979 and has been tasked multiple times with coming up with in-house solutions to address business needs without the software costs that are typically associated
Bill Franks knows a thing or two about big data. As Chief Analytics Officer at Teradata, Franks works to help determine the right strategies and positioning for his company in the advanced analytics space. Franks has taken his knowledge and written a book that answers questions such as: What is
At the IFSUG conference this week in Cary, NC I met Stephen Harris from Bank of America. Stephen gave the talk "Manage Your Partners Before You Manage Your Dashboards: Designing Great Dashboards" covering the business aspects of successfully implementing dashboards. When you back up for a second to consider the
The next time you write a DATA step, try to express it in iambic pentameter. Or instead of a SAS macro function, how about a SAS macro sonnet? (Or, for the more base among you, a limerick?) That's the spirit behind the code {poems} project. You write a poem in
We just returned from O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference with renewed excitement around ideas for SAS Press projects! The Tools of Change conference provides a forum through which publishers, authors, and publishing services organizations discuss issues and ideas around transforming the publishing industry from being primarily print-focused to delivering content
As a SAS developer, I am always looking ahead to the next release of SAS. However, many SAS customer sites migrate to new releases slowly and are just now adopting versions of SAS that were released in 2010 or 2011. Consequently, I want to write a few articles that discuss
Business analytics is maturing – and so is its role in forward-thinking organizations. Once mainly used in traditional batch-type environments, it's now being embedded into real-time business decision operations and processes to create immediate and significant value. To learn more about how to operationalize business analytics, attend this brief webinar,
In the last week, I have interviewed four retail executives about their predictions for big data and high-performance analytics in the retail industry. I hope to publish their thoughts here in the next few weeks, but in the meantime, here are six concrete benefits that big data can bring to retailers, if
I've blogged several times about multivariate normality, including how to generate random values from a multivariate normal distribution. But given a set of multivariate data, how can you determine if it is likely to have come from a multivariate normal distribution? The answer, of course, is to run a goodness-of-fit
About once a month, a customer approaches SAS and asks a question of significance. By "significance", I don't necessarily mean "of great importance", but instead I mean "of how SAS handles large numbers, or floating-point values with many significant digits". In response, we always first ask why they asked. This
