Sometimes a population of individuals is modeled as a combination of subpopulations. For example, if you want to model the heights of individuals, you might first model the heights of males and females separately. The height of the population can then be modeled as a combination of the male and
SAS will be at the DMA2011 conference in Boston on October 1-6, 2011, sponsoring David Meerman Scott in the Thought Leadership Series. David is a noted marketing strategist and author of seven books on marketing and PR, including The New Rules of Marketing and PR. His session is titled, 'How to
We continue my colleague Udo Sglavo's example with the SAS code for incorporating R models into SAS Forecast Server: Code for Including R Model Results in SAS As a first step I’m exporting a data set containing one time series from SAS to R (actually I will use the same
Sometimes when you change a couple of words around, you can end up with an entirely new concept. In a conversation with a co-worker around analytic roles and responsibilities, she noted that we shouldn’t be talking about “business intelligence analysts,” but discussing ways to create “intelligent business analysts.” Brilliant!! One
In 2009, SAFETEA-LU—the legislation that outlines federal transportation funding for the states—expired. Since then, members of Congress have been kicking the can down the road, passing funding extensions instead of passing legislation. The major impact of this failure to act is that the U.S. continues to slip further and further
In honor of last night’s 63rd Primetime Emmy Awards, I thought it would be fun to unveil a recent SAS Publishing video featuring SAS user and student ambassador Isabel Perry. I had the good fortune of being introduced to Isabel at SAS Global Forum 2011, thanks to colleague and master of connections Elizabeth Ceranowski, after
One of the sweet new capabilities in 9.2 OLAP for cube developers is the Cube Job that is automatically created for each new cube. The job is used as a interface mechanism to schedule the cube refresh code without manually retrieving the PROC OLAP code and customizing it for scheduling which we "old"
My colleague Udo Sglavo is back, responding to comments on his guest blog from two weeks ago. For fans of SAS and R, he shows how to incorporate results from Hyndman's R model into SAS. Do the Evolution After publishing my blog on replicating Rob J Hyndman’s cross validation idea
Like millions of other Americans, I recently was asked to make a decision of tremendous importance to my household -- a decision that would affect the welfare of everyone in my family. That decision, of course, was whether to continue to receive Netflix movies by mail, or opt for the
A women’s specialty retailer operating more than 1,000 boutiques, Chico’s FAS, Inc. was faced with a significant challenge: reducing the number of markdowns while more effectively targeting its middle- to high-income clientele. To achieve these goals, the company needed to optimize its prices and more effectively target its most valuable customers,
The other day I encountered a SAS Knowledge Base article that shows how to count the number of missing and nonmissing values for each variable in a data set. However, the code is a complicated macro that is difficult for a beginning SAS programmer to understand. (Well, it was hard
When trying to write out graphics to a specific filename location, the gsfname option is only honored when ODS LISTING is turned on and ODS HTML is turned off. This is especially important in 9.3 Base SAS as the ODS HTML option is the default output destination. Enterprise Guide users
Last week I showed a graph of the number of US births for each day in 2002, which shows a strong day-of-the-week effect. The graph also shows that the number of births on a given day is affected by US holidays. This blog post looks closer at the holiday effect.
As schools across the country delve into a new year, I want to bring my readers back to teaching basics with Part 2 of my Three R’s series on Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships. Here's Part 1. As students flood our halls and classrooms, are they eager and excited for the challenging year ahead? Do
At the end of Todd Wheatland's presentation, "Transforming a large organization into a content machine," at Content Marketing World, he offered a top ten list of tips for creating corporate content. I've pulled a few tips from his list and added in others from earlier in his talk that resonated
SAS 9.3 is here! In addition to the many new features and enhancements to the software, you will find changes to the SAS documentation as well. For example, the SAS Product Documentation page on support.sas.com has been redesigned to help you find information faster. These changes are presented in the
One of the hottest topics on today's agenda for financial institutions is FFIEC's recently released guidance supplement calling for layered fraud secuity and authentication. So, during the recent Terrorism Financing and Money Laundering Forum in Cary, North Carolina, a panel discussion on fraud was developed to discuss emerging trends in fraud -
As I mentioned in my introductory post about Windows PowerShell, you can use PowerShell commands as a simple and concise method to collect data from your Windows systems -- information that is ripe for analysis within SAS. In this example, I'll show a technique for using a SAS program to
Look at the following graphs showing one weekly time series. The left hand shows the actual time series plot. To the less statistically inclined this plot might indicate that the data is seasonal due to the troughs during summer and the peaks during winter. However, if you were to use
New for this year's Annual Terrorism Financing and Money Laundering Forum, the afternoon sessions were divided into two tracks, anti-money laundering (AML) and fraud, each featuring a topical presentation and a panel discussion. During the AML panel discussion on emerging trends, representatives from several US law enforcement agencies and the
My son, a senior in high school, recently announced his latest book assignment for his English AP class. “I need Portrait of the Artist for my English class.” (Usually this announcement comes just after the stores have closed and when he needs it really soon.) Ah! I HAVE a copy
I've been spending my weekends developing a SAS Publishing book proposal. (For those interested, it involves learning how to fully leverage SAS Stored Processes as a beginning programmer.) Creating examples and jumping between coding, testing and then writing about everything, I have had a heck of a time with my
Polynomials are used often in data analysis. Low-order polynomials are used in regression to model the relationship between variables. Polynomials are used in numerical analysis for numerical integration and Taylor series approximations. It is therefore important to be able to evaluate polynomials in an efficient manner. My favorite evaluation technique
Sunday marked 10 years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks forever changed our focus on threats to US security. Last week, SAS hosted the 7th annual Terrorism Financing and Money Laundering Forum, a day of information sharing among the key players from both the public and private sectors in the
In this guest blog, my colleague Snurre Jensen (Analytic Solutions Manager, SAS EMEA Technology Practice) discusses a fine point regarding the word “seasonality” in time series forecasting. When we see general ups and downs in the data that tend to repeat year after year, we commonly refer to this as
Rick Wicklin and I are engaged in an arms race of birthday-related blog posts. To recap: Rick analyzed national data about births in the USA and what time of year they are most likely to occur. I responded by analyzing the birthdays of my Facebook friends. Rick responded by analyzing
Here is a four-stage approach to financial forecasting. I urge you to seriously consider adopting at least level 1, then next look at how layering on the other stages might transform your approach to business planning. The four stages are: (1) Multiple Forecast Inputs, (2) Marco Polo, (3) Driver-based forecasting,
My friend Chris posted an analysis of the distribution of birthdays for 236 of his Facebook friends. He noted that more of his friends have birthdays in April than in September. The numbers were 28 for April, but only 25 for September. As I reported in my post on "the
The SAS Power Series Tour had its most recent stop in the heart of Silicon Valley, San Jose. This gave me another chance to test my hypothesis that firms in the Valley are not big users of analytics. My theory goes that high-tech firms are much more focused on creating
The downturn in the economy beginning in 2008 and continuing even to now has put tremendous pressure on local governments to do “less with less”. In the past when economic downturns caused service level cut backs the cry was to do “more with less”. The idea was to identify ways
