I just had a great conversation about big data and high-performance analytics with Eric Williams, retired CIO of Catalina Marketing, and I hope to publish some of what he had to say here in the next few weeks. In the meantime, you can learn a lot about how big data
This week's SAS author's tip comes from Randy Collica and his new book Customer Segmentation and Clustering Using SAS Enterprise Miner, Second Edition. Randy, a Senior Solutions Architect for SAS, is extremely knowledgeable and approachable. In his new book, Randy uses SAS Enterprise Miner and the most commonly available techniques for customer
Wired had an interesting article recently, discussing how “Darpa,” the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) research agency, is requesting proposals for implantable biosensors. Darpa is interested in the application of this technology for “real-time, accurate measurements of ‘DoD-relevant biomarkers’ including stress hormones, like cortisol, and compounds that signal inflammation, like
I have previously blogged about how to convert a covariance matrix into a correlation matrix in SAS (and the other way around). However, I still get questions about it, perhaps because my previous post demonstrated more than one way to accomplish each transformation. To eliminate all confusion, the following SAS/IML
Back in my day-one post of this "HPA once a day project," I promised a post about Twitter as "big data." I know some of you are already moaning about the noise on Twitter and the "what I ate for breakfast" type of commentary that's prevalent there. So I'm going to
I love dogs. Not to the extent that Rick Santorum has to be concerned. And not to the extent of actually having a dog as a pet. But man-dog love has become an issue in the 2012 US presidential campaign, and I thought The BFD readers should know my stance
Bank Systems & Technology just published a special issue focused on "big data" - and how high-performance analytics helps solve the big data problem. Clicking on the cover image will take you to the ebook, so you can flip through 24 pages full of information about the benefits of big data for banking.
I previously described how to use Mahalanobis distance to find outliers in multivariate data. This article takes a closer look at Mahalanobis distance. A subsequent article will describe how you can compute Mahalanobis distance. Distance in standard units In statistics, we sometimes measure "nearness" or "farness" in terms of the
Building Business Intelligence Using SAS: Content Development Examples by Tricia Aanderud and Angela Hall just published this month. This highly anticipated book—called “a must read for anyone using SAS® BI”* —is a quick-start guide that will help users move quickly from using only one of the SAS BI Clients to
History is easy to explain. We can always come up with some story for why this or that occurred. And, if the story sounds plausible enough, the explanation will be accepted as true. But can we ever know that the explanation is correct? How would we ever test it? If we
How we love shortcuts. Our life seems more efficient with them. I try to take the earlier train for a good parking spot that lets me exit early. Actually change that to any spot (my train station has tons of commuters with FEW parking spaces so getting up early is the
The 8th annual Krispy Kreme Challenge race was just held in downtown Raleigh, NC. This event was started in 2004 as a dare among a few NC State undergrads. They had this idea to race 2 miles to the local Krispy Kreme doughnuts, down a dozen of the confections, and
I'm not a fan of obscure acronyms in blog post titles, but by the end of this month I'm hoping HPA won't be obscure to anyone who reads this blog. It stands for high-performance analytics, and I'm challenging myself to blog about it once a day for the next month.
Way back when I learned to program, I remember a computer instructor explaining that an IF-THEN statement can be a relatively slow operation. He said "If a multiplication takes one unit of time, an IF statement requires about 70 units." I don't know where his numbers came from, or even
I have a love-hate relationship with spreadsheet data. I am interested in finding data to analyze, and if it arrives in the form of a spreadsheet, I'll take it. And I like to deliver results and reports, but often my constituents ask for it as a spreadsheet that they can
As SAS user Marje Fecht said "We all want a 'SAS programming assistant' to help us complete our jobs more quickly." Fecht, Senior Partner at Prowerk Consulting, then went on to say "In her book SAS Macro Programming Made Easy, Second Edition, Michele Burlew encourages us to take advantage of the SAS
As a little girl growing up in rural North Carolina, I remember going to my Granddaddy’s fishing pond. My Daddy and Granddaddy loved to fish but as a six-year-old the fishing was boring to me. I was more interested in finding the worms to put on the fish hook. I’d
My colleague Geoffrey Taylor recently wrote about the education and training of analytic resources and the potential shortage of these resources in the job market. My other colleague Russ Cobb addressed building an analytical workforce in his recent entry. What’s on my mind is what happens when you finally find
The American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials recently released a top 10 list of transportation issues that will be “talked, written or tweeted and legislated about” in 2012. As expected, funding constraints and Congressional action on reauthorization appear on the list but the group also notes that natural disaster
Greetings! My name is Kelly Miller and I am a marketer at SAS, focused specifically on the health care industry for 8 years now. And what an intriguing industry it is! Technology and market demands have led to dramatic changes, and now that health care reform is driving innovation, it's become even more interesting (it’s also one
Unlike prior versions of SAS OLAP technology, 9.2 provides more options for maintaining and refreshing OLAP cubes. With this comes some discussion about what each one does alone, and how pairing these techniques really provides SAS OLAP Server Administrators and cube developers a cornucopia of OLAP options. PROC OLAPOPERATE Remember
A variance-covariance matrix expresses linear relationships between variables. Given the covariances between variables, did you know that you can write down an invertible linear transformation that "uncorrelates" the variables? Conversely, you can transform a set of uncorrelated variables into variables with given covariances. The transformation that works this magic is
As a new contributor to SAS’ Customer Analytics blog, let me introduce myself. I’m a SAS field marketer focused on integrated campaigns, digital strategy and the marketing investment for Financial Services in the US. As a marketer, I always take an interest in the Super Bowl commercials. The $3.5M spent
Some ideas sound great (combining chocolate with peanut butter) and turn out great (Reese's Peanut Butter Cup). Some ideas sound great (getting a face lift) but turn out bad (Kenny Rogers, Greta Van Susteren). Some ideas sound bad (a Run-DMC / Aerosmith duet) but turn out great ("Walk This Way"). Some ideas sound bad (letting
More than 1,000 attendees from all facets of the Publishing industry gathered in New York in January for the 2012 Digital Book World Conference. Not surprisingly, the topic of eBooks and their impact on the industry was a focal point of the three day event. Many of the presentations, the
Many of the chapters in my new book Building Business Intelligence Using SAS: Content Development Examples were straightforward to write but one in particular was the beast. Neither Tricia nor I wanted to tackle the SAS BI Dashboard chapter. Just chalk it up to no major work experience with this
In less than two weeks, I’ll be in sunny Florida attending a brand new conference. According to their Web site, Statistical Practice 2012 aims to bring together hundreds of statistical practitioners, including data analysts, researchers and scientists who engage in the application of statistics to solve real-world problems on a daily basis.
In my view of things, as a (semi) professional in software product marketing focused on the needs of direct marketers, with the possible exception of “CRM”, there may be no term more abstract, than that of “campaign management”. Seriously. I help market and sell campaign management software, yet very few
Have you ever wanted to run a sample program from the SAS documentation or wanted to use a data set that appears in the SAS documentation? You can: all programs and data sets in the documentation are distributed with SAS, you just have to know where to look! Sample data
Have you noticed the annoying stock art they put on The BFD blog header? All I can think of is "If those idiots only used SAS Forecast Server, they wouldn't have to draw graphs all over their window panes just to do forecasting." It must really p.o. the housekeeping staff at that
