Are you struggling to kick start your organization’s analytics journey, especially when it comes to leveraging advanced analytics and machine learning techniques? If the answer is yes then you’re definitely not alone. Whilst most organisations today recognise the benefit of analytics and data science, many are still struggling to kick
In a previous article, I showed how to use SAS to perform mean imputation. However, there are three problems with using mean-imputed variables in statistical analyses: Mean imputation reduces the variance of the imputed variables. Mean imputation shrinks standard errors, which invalidates most hypothesis tests and the calculation of confidence
With SAS Data Management, you can setup SAS Data Remediation to manage and correct data issues. SAS Data Remediation allows user- or role-based access to data exceptions. Last time I talked about how to register and use a Data Remediation service. This time we will look at how to use
Finding a pattern like a phone number or national ID number embedded in text can be difficult and time consuming.
I recently read an interesting article about petroleum coke (petcoke). A lot of it is produced in the US, and lately a lot of it is consumed (burned) in India ... contributing to air pollution there. The article mentioned some numbers in the text, but the data was really begging to
A steady drumbeat of news coverage makes one thing clear: Opioid abuse is rising and has reached epidemic levels throughout our country. Overdoses from the diversion and abuse of prescription opioids are one cause of the surge in deaths. Overdoses from heroin and other illicit synthetic opioids (such as heroin,
In my previous post, I described a new options to control the widths of the caps for Whiskers, Error and Limit bars. This topic could have been titled "Little things go a long way", as such details really make for a good graph. In a similar manner, another detail issue
The internet is rich with data, and much of that data seems to exist only on web pages, which -- for some crazy reason -- are designed for humans to read. When students/researchers want to apply data science techniques to analyze collect and analyze that data, they often turn to
During my 35 years of using SAS® software, I have found the CNTLIN and CNTLOUT options in the FORMAT procedure to be among the most useful features that I routinely suggest to other SAS users. The CNTLIN option enables you to create user-defined formats from a SAS data set (input
Imputing missing data is the act of replacing missing data by nonmissing values. Mean imputation replaces missing data in a numerical variable by the mean value of the nonmissing values. This article shows how to perform mean imputation in SAS. It also presents three statistical drawbacks of mean imputation. How
Swing through December with the Kettlebell swing! This is an intermediate-advanced, full-body movement that involves a bit of momentum and lots of dynamic, core strength. These will swing your heart rate in gear! Remember to use your hips, brace your core, and keep the bell at chest height or lower
Until recently state-of-the-art for trade area analytics still meant analyzing historical store sales by location, together with some Nielsen market data to select merchandise assortments and allocation. Contrast that with the upcoming holiday season where retailers know where and how demand is initiated, and use that new understanding to create
Since Trump became the US president, many people have noticed that he posts a lot of tweets. While some people choose to analyze and critique the content of those tweets, I was more curious about something a little less controversial - the timing and frequency. Follow along as I dig into
David Loshin explains what it means to be a data-driven business by describing three different models.
There are so many reasons why SAS programmers love SAS -- as a matter of fact, I wrote a blog on it back in 2012. I now realize that I could've written a whole series, not just a single post. And with the recent publishing of my first book, Big Data
In this education analytics series of blog posts, we have been on a journey to learn how education customers are turning their data into insights to be a more data-informed and analytical organizations. In my first five posts in the education analytics blog series, we learned how education customers are using SAS,
How do you define artificial intelligence? Would you define it differently if it was your job to prevent fraud and financial crimes, where the risks are constantly shifting? In a recent meeting with banking executives responsible for fraud and financial crimes risk mitigation, Wayne Thompson, Manager of Data Science Technologies
Whether or not to legalize marijuana is a hotly debated topic these days. And no matter which side of the debate you're on, I think you will be interested in seeing several ways to visualize which states have legalized marijuana, and when ... Their Version Here's the original graph that
It’s not unusual to hear women in their 50’s and 60’s discuss physical symptoms they’re experiencing associated with menopause.
November is National Diabetes Awareness Month. Did you know that according to the American Diabetes Association an estimated 30 million or 9.4 percent of Americans has diabetes? Over ten years ago two of my family members were diagnosed. Hearing this news was both scary and overwhelming for the entire family.
Missing values present challenges for the statistical analyst and data scientist. Many modeling techniques (such as regression) exclude observations that contain missing values, which can reduce the sample size and reduce the power of a statistical analysis. Before you try to deal with missing values in an analysis (for example,
The CAS procedure (PROC CAS) enables us to interact with SAS Cloud Analytic Services (CAS) from the SAS client based on the CASL (the scripting language of CAS) specification. CASL supports a variety of data types including INT, DOUBLE, STRING, TABLE, LIST, BLOB, and others. The result of a CAS
SAS Viya is an exciting addition to the SAS Platform, allowing you to conduct analysis faster than ever before and providing you the flexibility to utilize open source technologies and generate insights from data in any computing environment. The blog post “Top 12 Advantages of SAS Viya” does a great
If you’re like me, you probably feel like there's more bad news than good in the world today. And, it makes me that much more grateful when I hear some good news. That’s part of why I love Giving Tuesday so much – it’s a day where my social media
While I’d like to say that I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving, I know this was not the case for everyone. While I’d like to wish you a joyous holiday season ahead, I know that for some this may seem a bit out of reach. While the holiday season
You never know where you’ll see great teaching in action. That was made abundantly clear to me when my family ventured to rural Lillington, North Carolina to learn about falconry, civilization’s oldest form of hunting. We are not hunters ourselves, but my husband is fascinated by birds of prey and
The SG procedures and GTL statements do a lot of work for us to display the data using the specified statements. This includes setting many details such as arrow heads, line patterns etc, including caps. Often, such details have a fixed design according to what seems reasonable for most use
The most highly anticipated business announcement this fall is probably the location for Amazon's second headquarters (dubbed HQ2). Amazon plans to spend $5 billion on their HQ2, and employ about 50,000 people in high-tech jobs. They received 238 proposals before their October 19 deadline, but haven't announced a winner yet.
When you run an optimization, it is often not clear how to provide the optimization algorithm with an initial guess for the parameters. A good guess converges quickly to the optimal solution whereas a bad guess might diverge or require many iterations to converge. Many people use a default value
If you're preparing a big Thanksgiving dinner, then you don't want to leave out the most popular side dish, do you?!? But what is the most popular side dish? ... If you don't already know, then perhaps some data & analytics can help! But before we get started, here's a
