This is the seventh post in my series of machine best practices. Catch up by reading the first post or the whole series now. Generalization is the learned model’s ability to fit well to new, unseen data instead of the data it was trained on. Overfitting refers to a model that fits
Managing big data doesn't always mean hiring more people and buying new tools.
As the summer season begins to become part of the past and we return to a “normal” schedule, I’m reminded that there is still something celebratory as we slowly make our way into the autumn season. It’s yoga! September is National Yoga Month. It is a national health observance designated
Parents, I don’t need to tell you three obvious things: Sleep is critical to our well-being (no matter what age you are). Ask any primary care physician or therapist. Tweens and teens need more sleep than they get (need an average of 9-10 hours, but almost half get fewer than
Correlation is a fundamental statistical concept that measures the linear association between two variables. There are multiple ways to think about correlation: geometrically, algebraically, with matrices, with vectors, with regression, and more. To paraphrase the great songwriter Paul Simon, there must be 50 ways to view your correlation! But don't
From June 6 to 9 the first ever ‘Dutch Data Science Week’ took place in the Netherlands. The week consisted of 4 days in which 28 events took place in 6 different locations. During the week people could attend classes ranging from beginner to advanced levels, visit meetups, participate in
Everybody GET UP! Want to train the entire body in one exercise? This is it! The Turkish Getup is a multi-joint, multi-movement exercise that incorporates transitioning from the ground to standing. This exercise requires synergy, coordination, and core/shoulder stabilization to increase your functional strength. It may seem daunting, but it is
International Talk Like a Pirate Day is Sept 19 ... which always gets me thinking and wondering about modern-day pirates. Most movies usually focus on pirates from the Golden Age of piracy (a couple hundred years ago), when pirates typically stole ships and booty (treasure). But modern day pirates usually board
What’s new and what’s on the horizon for machine learning and analytics? We asked Kirk Borne, Principal Data Scientist and Executive Advisor at Booz Allen Hamilton, what machine learning technologies he’s watching. He focused his reply on applications, not algorithms. “When I think about what’s new and coming up, I
In my first post of this blog series, we learned how three education customers are using SAS. Today, we'll hear about the positive impact that SAS and analytics are providing for users and the education institutions. In this post, you'll hear from: Linda Sullivan, Assistant Vice President for Institutional Knowledge Management,
This post shows a variety of techniques including how to use PROC TEMPLATE and the SOURCE statement, PROC SGPLOT with multiple Y-axis tables, create comparable axes in two side-by-side graphs, create a broken axis, write and use a table template that wraps text, and find and display examples of certain statements in graph templates and fonts in style templates.
A previous article discussed the mathematical properties of the singular value decomposition (SVD) and showed how to use the SVD subroutine in SAS/IML software. This article uses the SVD to construct a low-rank approximation to an image. Applications include image compression and denoising an image. Construct a grayscale image The
In the recent article, “Price-bots can collude against consumers,” the Economist discusses the consumer effects of prices set by price-bots. The article starts with an example of gasoline pricing strategies on Martha’s Vineyard. With a small number of gas stations on the island, the price-bots can cover all competitor prices frequently
I hate hard-coding variable lists in my SAS code. I love the special variable lists SAS provides, like name:, _numeric_, etc. But back in 2011, I wrote a post titled Jedi SAS Tricks - Building a Name Suffix variable list lamenting the lack of a special variable list in base
I know that we are all anxiously following the devastating events in Houston right now. I have a very personal connection as my daughter and her family live in Houston. My daughter is a nurse and is on the emergency response team – she has been at the hospital since
Widespread flooding. Downed power lines. Broken poles. Failed transformers and breakers. Leaking pipes. Shut down refineries. The toll that a catastrophic storm takes on the energy value chain is significant. A functioning power grid, clean water and reliable fuel sources are critical for public safety and economic recovery. Even with
David Loshin explains how to set up a data catalog that will help you get more value from a data lake.
My daughter is a junior in high school, and for almost every semester she’s taken an online course as part of her studies. This semester she’s taking Spanish 3, an advanced level course where every word of instruction is spoken in Spanish. Each morning she joins the class from our
This example shows how to create two coordinated range attribute maps and use them in creating an animated gif of the eclipse.
This is the sixth post in my series of machine learning best practices. If you've come across the series for the first time, you can go back to the beginning or read the whole series. Aristotle was likely one of the first data scientists who studied empiricism by learning through
News flash: My favorite SAS code editor is SAS Enterprise Guide. However, my favorite general purpose text editor is Notepad++, and I often find myself using that tool for viewing SAS log files and for making small modifications to SAS programs. Judging from the popularity of this SAS Support Communities
The U.S. was really fortunate in having the recent total solar eclipse pass through so many of its states! This gave lots of people an opportunity to see it, with just a short (or moderate) drive. I think a little kid spoke for all of us when they said "Let's
The Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) is a new European-wide regulation that requires European banks to make it easier to share customer transaction and account data (where the customer has given their consent) with third party providers, and it's the current hot topic across the payments industry in Europe. As
What’s your favorite time of day? For me, it’s the morning with a cup of coffee, just as the sun starts to appear on the horizon, emitting a pleasant warm glow. My least favorite part of the day? Mornings without coffee when that same big ball of light makes a
I have been working in the field of Professional Certification and Licensure for roughly 10 years. In that time, I've worked with and observed close to 40 IT certification programs and there has been a recurring question I've encountered at each stop. While it is often phrased differently, it means mostly the same
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS COMMUNICATION STANDARDS is an organisation defining international standards in business communication and presenting proposals relating to designing easy-to-understand business reports and presentations.
There is an expression in the military that goes something like this: Military leaders train and prepare for the next war using available information, which typically means they're planning for the last (previous) war -- and that's a recipe for disaster. So what does this have to do with utilities
No time to prepare healthy meals during the week? Find yourself eating out more often than you’d like or skipping meals altogether because you don’t have food in the fridge? Wondering how to make eating real, whole food easier? Batch cooking is your new secret weapon!
In this guest blogger post, Chris Gray of Gray Research weighs in on the discussion of forecasting vs. budgeting. Chris Gray on Forecasting vs. Budgeting Generally I agree with Steve Morlidge’s points about the differences between forecasts (or sales plans) and budgets, and the fact that they are unlikely to
All statisticians are familiar with the classical arithmetic mean. Some statisticians are also familiar with the geometric mean. Whereas the arithmetic mean of n numbers is the sum divided by n, the geometric mean of n nonnegative numbers is the n_th root of the product of the numbers. The geometric
