Where will you be Oct. 24 and 25? I will be in sunny, warm Orlando, with hundreds of like-minded folks, at the Analytics 2011 conference. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve talked with SAS customers about analytic topics. In fact, we have a number of analytics books in the
I received the following email: Dear Dr. Wicklin, Why doesn't SYMPUT work in IML? In the DATA step, I can say CALL SYMPUT("MyMacro", 5) but this doesn't work in IML! Frustrated Dear Frustrated, The SYMPUT subroutine does work in SAS/IML software! However, the second argument to SYMPUT must be a
SAS is once again a proud sponsor of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization conference, happening in New York City on October 19-21, 2011. One of the ways to participate in eMetrics that we have found the most engaging is by hosting a “Marketing Lab.” Marketing Labs are designed to allow the
I am a shopper. I always have been. As a teenager, a fun weekend for me was hours at the mall, trying on cool clothes, procuring perfume samples from the department store make-up counters, and hanging out with friends at the food court. But my love for shopping doesn’t end
If you are interested in hearing firsthand about the benefits, business issues and challenges involved in implementing analytics you'll want to hear directly from an organization that is actively applying analytics and customer intelligence to create business value. We invite you to view this live webinar to learn how Verizon applied
At our latest Power Series event in Manhattan, one of the teams took a futuristic approach to addressing data challenges. They described the need for a “compliance box” that front ends the data management process that integrates, cleanses and ensure data integrity across a number of different, typically silo’d data
I previously wrote about using SAS/IML for nonlinear optimization, and demonstrated optimization by maximizing a likelihood function. Many well-known optimization algorithms require derivative information during the optimization, including the conjugate gradient method (implemented in the NLPCG subroutine) and the Newton-Raphson method (implemented in the NLPNRA method). You should specify analytic
I just returned from a vacation to the Pacific Northwest. What a place! The highlight was a whitewater rafting trip we took on the White Salmon River in Washington. The trip is scenic and chaotic. The track of river we ran delivers a steady barrage of class 3-4 rapids and
We had the third episode of the SAS Power Series in New York last night. The event was very well attended—including a few meeting crashers who apparently had nothing to do with analytics, but fortunately they left early. Jim Davis, the CMO of SAS, started the evening with a definition
Tonight I get to temporarily return to (sort of) being in my 20s. I’ve been invited to attend my alma mater the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Ad/PR Networking Night, along with several other professionals in the area. We’ll each have 30 seconds to share a little about our
Business Problem: The traffic lighting (red/green/yellow) range is different for one group/category than the others but the indicator needs to include all group values. Recommendation: It's all in the data. Here is an example. For the Candy_Sales_Summary data (located in the EG Sample Data folder) there are three groups of
Picture this – a student grabs the Programming 1 textbook, scans it quickly seemingly searching for something specific, and shakes his head indicating an unsuccessful search. He plants himself smack dab in the front row, looks me squarely in the eye, raises one eyebrow quizzically and says, “Bad words?” I
A popular use of SAS/IML software is to optimize functions of several variables. One statistical application of optimization is estimating parameters that optimize the maximum likelihood function. This post gives a simple example for maximum likelihood estimation (MLE): fitting a parametric density estimate to data. Which density curve fits the
What is the best way to organize your SAS work in a SAS Enterprise Guide project? There are no project templates or enforced structure, really, but isn't there a best practice? I don't have a single prescription for the best project organization. I believe that it depends on the nature
Once you have watched the movie “Waiting for Superman”, you can't help but worry for children in school. It was very eye-opening for me to see what challenges students and parents face to get a quality education. Being the parent of three children and given my role at SAS as a marketer
To celebrate the first anniversary of Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software, you can now download the SAS/IML tip sheets (also called "cheat sheets") that I created for the book. At conferences, SAS Press displays these tip sheets next to my book. They have been very popular. Download these SAS/IML cheat
Before you read the rest of this post, can you guess which book is the parent of this week's SAS author's tip? I'll give you a few hints (because I'm nice like that on late Friday afternoons). It's 436 pages, was written by 4 coauthors with a combined IQ that
In my last post, titled How to find the most profitable growth opportunities, I talked about the first of three main customer challenges that we solve with our Customer Intelligence solutions, finding the best growth opportunities, which involves using information and data management, segmentation, modeling and scoring, and having a
I've noticed that a lot of people want to be able to draw bar charts with confidence intervals. This topic is a frequent posting on the SAS/GRAPH and ODS Graphics Discussion Forum and on the SAS-L mailing list. Consequently, this post describes how to add errors bars to a bar
With an increasing volume of curriculum to cover and no time to spare, teachers often hit the ground running with the full throttle rigor and relevance critical to teaching and learning. However, I argue that the first two R’s are futile if teachers don’t have meaningful relationships with their students.
He’s quick-witted, fit, and skilled with the written word, but there are many layers to SAS Press acquisitions editor George McDaniel. And George’s colleagues have taken the liberty of revealing some unique qualities of this multi-talented man. George's SAS Press superlative is: a) most likely to develop a conspiracy theory.
I want to share highlights from a different kind of day I recently had at SAS that was spent with a customer, YouSee, and thought leader James Taylor, CEO of Decision Management Solutions. We all shared a "Deep Dive Day" at SAS Headquarters here in Cary, North Carolina. Read on
It turns out that I'm not receiving the maximum potential value from my Netflix streaming service. Perhaps it's because I place too much value on sleep. With my monthly subscription, I am permitted to view Netflix content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In my house I have
I recently experienced one of life’s precious moments. My 9 year old granddaughter coaxed me up a tree. She loves to climb trees and she wanted Gma to experience the joy she felt when high above the earth. I recall as a child loving to climb trees. Life seemed so
Before I can even talk about blog strategy, I have to admit that I am not naturally a strategic thinker. I am rumored to be organized and slightly more analytical than your average writer, but I am first and foremost a creative, right-brained thinker. This means my immediate reaction when
Charles Leadbeater, a leading authority on innovation and creativity, headlines his Think Piece on big data and the civic long tail with the phrase “Big data must be opened up to the wisdom of the crowd...” Intriguing - yes, but what does it all mean? His first sentence is almost
When you misspell a word on your mobile device or in a word-processing program, the software might "autocorrect" your mistake. This can lead to some funny mistakes, such as the following: I hate Twitter's autocorrect, although changing "extreme couponing" to "extreme coupling" did make THAT tweet more interesting. [@AnnMariaStat] When
Last week, a new film featuring Brad Pitt came to theaters, and for a change, I’ll be dragging my wife to see it instead of the other way around. Moneyball is based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis (2003) which chronicles the new-age, statistically driven philosophy successfully adopted by
We’ve talked a lot lately about the overwhelming tide of data – velocity, volume and complexity – that organizations are dealing with. SAS wanted to know how organizations are currently managing "big data," what resources would be required in the future and how to plan for those needs. The Economist
SAS has several ways to round a number to an integer. You can round a number up, round it down, or round it to the nearest integer. If your data contain both positive and negative values, you can also round numbers toward zero, or away from zero. The functions that
