Note: Following is an eight-part serialization of selected content from Steve Morlidge's The Little (Illustrated) Book of Operational Forecasting. What IS a forecast? First of all, we need to be absolutely clear what a forecast is – and what it isn’t. A forecast is a best estimate of future
When you hear someone refer to an ‘inside baseball’ move, it means they’re playing into the subtleties of the game. Inside baseball requires a high level of awareness, experience, and strategic thought. This typically results in a mix of strategies to get runners on base and manufacture runs rather than
The Little (Illustrated) Book of Operational Forecasting Steve Morlidge's latest work, The Little (Illustrated) Book of Operational Forecasting, is a unique contribution to the field. It is a guide for short term operational forecasting, delivered in a pocket-sized format, through 79 brief (two page) illustrated lessons. As I stated in my
Did you know that the call for content is now open for SAS Global Forum 2019? Get the details and see why next year's Conference Chair MaryAnne DePesquo is excited about the big event in Dallas, Texas, April 28-May 1, 2019.
Using small multiples is a neat way to display a lot of information in a small amount of space. But depending on how deeply you want to analyze and scrutinize the data, you need to be careful in choosing just how small you make your small multiples. Let's look at
No matter who you are, or how much you’ve practiced (or how well rehearsed you are) - an interview is stressful! Being on the other side of the table as the recruiter, I wanted to share some tips to help alleviate that stress. It all comes down to preparation. If
I love data; I’m a real and unabashed data geek. I'm the sci-fi nerd who has fun with data from Star Wars and analyzes World of Warcraft logs using SAS. More importantly, I love what data can do. I love the way it can show people new insights and new ideas,
Video killed the radio star.... We can't rewind, we've gone too far. -- The Buggles (1979) "You kids have it easy," my father used to tell me. "When I was a kid, I didn't have all the conveniences you have today." He's right, and I could say the same
Have you ever wanted to see examples of all of the output styles that SAS provides? You can run a program and look at the resulting file, styles.html. This post explains more about the styles that you will see including a discussion of attribute priority.
Get ready to have your mind blown. Whether or not you plan to attend Analytics Experience in San Diego on September 17, you'll be inspired by the speakers we have lined up to keynote the event. There's an inventor. A data scientist. A world class athlete. And a photographer. They've
Avoid frustrations by following these 5 tips from David Loshin to create a successful data management strategy for analytics.
Visualization of data density estimation, which is often used in statistical analysis and machine learning, will show the data’s characteristics like distribution, skewness and modality, etc. Commonly-used data density visualizations include boxplot, histogram, kernel density estimates, and some other plots. This blog post visualizes the kernel density estimates superimposing on histogram using SAS Visual Analytics.
When I'm at a social gathering, someone always asks what type of work I do. I like to keep my social life separate from my work, therefore I usually give a vague answer such as "software" (and quickly change the topic). How vague or specific is your response? How vague
In SAS Viya 3.4, promotion support has been added for many additional SAS 9.4 resources, making it easier to make the leap to Viya. In this blog, SAS' Gerry Nelson reviews this new functionality.
This article shows how to perform an optimization in SAS when the parameters are restricted by nonlinear constraints. In particular, it solves an optimization problem where the parameters are constrained to lie in the annular region between two circles. The end of the article shows the path of partial solutions
Even though I’ve worked at SAS for nearly 30 years, I still get excited when great things come together for our customers! This year we are hosting the very first hackathon at our Analytics Experience conference in San Diego - the AnalyticsX Hackathon. Analytics Experience is in its third year
I bet you were not expecting a photo of 22 youngsters in swimsuits in a math blog, were you? The first time I heard about this reality TV show called "Are You The One?", my nerdiness and love for OR yelled at me: "There is so much math in this
Data in the cloud makes it easily accessible, and can help businesses run more smoothly. SAS Viya runs its calculations on Cloud Analytics Service (CAS). David Shannon of Amadeus Software spoke at SAS Global Forum 2018 on his paper, Come On, Baby, Light my SAS Viya: Programming for CAS.
In the oil industry you can make or lose money based on how good your forecasts are, so I’ve pulled together six papers that discuss different ways in which you can leverage analytics to optimize your output and more accurately predict your production performance. Written by employees at oil and
My colleague, Robert Allison, recently published an interesting visualization of the relationship between chess ratings and age. His post was inspired by the article "Age vs Elo — Your battle against time," which was published on the chess.com website. ("Elo" is one of the rating systems in chess.) Robert Allison's
People across the country (and world) are not getting the care they need. There are many data efforts to address that, but I personally believe traditional analytics are short-sighted, too illness-focused, and remarkably negative. We need to take a more holistic approach to data, policy, and health care, including traditional
I am unabashedly a data zealot, but not a data scientist. I believe in the power of data and data analytics, and that the data revolution has started. It will transform all our lives in ways we cannot even imagine. This is one of the things that attracted me to
Elections are in the news again, therefore I have been on the lookout for interesting graphs. I recently found some graphs of the Census Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration Supplement data, and tried to improve them. Follow along if you're interested in voter data, or creating better graphs!
Better decisions and analytics innovation – fringe benefits of having comprehensive data governance policies.
Hash tables are a very powerful and flexible data structure. Most SAS applications of hash tables focus on just one of their many powerful facilities: table lookup. Hash tables are a fantastic table lookup tool and their use for that should never be diminished. However, hash tables can do so
In machine learning, a feature is another word for an attribute or input, or an independent variable. What is feature engineering? Feature engineering is a process of preparing inputs for machine learning models. The goal of feature engineering is to to improve classification accuracy by considering the limitations of the
Recently I’ve been listening to the BBC Radio Series 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy, which was first broadcast in 2016. One of the episodes considers the impact of a simple box (the shipping container) and concludes its invention was a major contributor to the post-war boom in global
We’re bringing the concept of #VideoTag to LinkedIn. What's #VideoTag, you ask? It's an online adaptation of the old schoolyard game. In short, you record a video of yourself, upload it to LinkedIn and tag others to respond. It’s a fun, easy way to spur conversation online by showing your
I peruse many different websites to get my news, and I always keep an eye out for good (or bad) presentations of data. I recently saw a posting on reddit claiming "U.S. GDP is greater than the total of all others combined." This news seemed too good to be true
We’ve known for decades that certain chemicals in our food supply could be damaging to our bodies. With more and more evidence accumulating, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) finally put out an official policy statement pointing out these dangers, especially for infants and children.
