Conversations around equity in education are at a fever pitch. Decades of research show that students of color and low-income students are disproportionately taught by less effective or more inexperienced teachers. Civil rights leaders encouraged the Obama administration to require states to develop Equity Plans to ensure that every student
Ensemble methods are commonly used to boost predictive accuracy by combining the predictions of multiple machine learning models. The traditional wisdom has been to combine so-called “weak” learners. However, a more modern approach is to create an ensemble of a well-chosen collection of strong yet diverse models. Building powerful ensemble models
Are you caught up in the machine learning forecasting frenzy? Is it reality or more hype? There's been a lot of hype about using machine learning for forecasting. And rightfully so, given the advancements in data collection, storage, and processing along with technology improvements, such as super computers and more powerful
A common barrier to quantitative research, especially in health and financial areas, is the inability to share sensitive data due to confidentiality and privacy. It can be difficult and time consuming to get permission to share the data, which means useful research is delayed or not even attempted. However, collaborators seeking
The US unemployment rate was down to 4.4% in April, which is the lowest we've seen since before the big recession (about 10 years ago). But a single number seldom tells the whole story, so let's look at unemployment data in several different ways, to get a more complete picture...
The April 2017 issue of Significance magazine features a cover story by Robert Langkjaer-Bain about the Flint (Michigan) water crisis. For those who don't know, the Flint water crisis started in 2014 when the impoverished city began using the Flint River as a source of city water. The water was
Deep learning made the headlines when the UK’s AlphaGo team beat Lee Sedol, holder of 18 international titles, in the Go board game. Go is more complex than other games, such as Chess, where machines have previously crushed famous players. The number of potential moves explodes exponentially so it wasn’t
Phil Simon looks at AWS's evolution before making some predictions about the future of Hadoop.
I am having a rough spring. My allergies are awful, really dreadful. I got sick and couldn't knock it for months. I injured my hip flexor in December and on some days in Jan, Feb, and March it hurt to even stand still much less exercise. And did I mention I am 50? I
Artificial intelligence. Big data. Cognitive computing. These buzzwords are the ABCs of today’s marketplace. In a recent interview at SAS® Global Forum, I discussed the unprecedented pace of change that we’re seeing in the market. It’s creating what I like to call an analytics economy. In this economy, analytics –
The forecast is frightening: Robots will take over all manual labor and self-generating code will automatically spin out the algorithms once developed by statisticians and programmers. Humans will become obsolete. What will mere mortals do all day long? Ride captive as our self-driving cars take us on a sentimental journey
I guess a coding dinosaur is someone who uses an old/legacy computer language, or at least a language that isn't en vogue these days. Coding dinosaurs are still around (and probably will be for a while), whereas the real dinosaurs that lived millions of years ago are extinct. What caused
The little SAS program’s official name was Extract_Transform_Load_ 0314.sas. But, that name was much too formal, way too long, and did not roll off of the tongue very easily at all. So, everybody simply called her: ETL Pi. ETL Pi was conceived in a 2-hour project strategy meeting in conference
Last week I showed a timeline of living US presidents. The number of living presidents is constant during the time interval between inaugurations and deaths of presidents. The data was taken from a Wikipedia table (shown below) that shows the number of years and days between events. This article shows
The Foresight Practitioner Conference returns to Raleigh, NC (November 15-16), with a theme of "Recoupling Forecasting with Inventory Control and Supply Planning." This event is produced jointly by Foresight and the North Carolina State University Institute for Advanced Analytics, and deals with an important topic. Too often we consider forecasting
An idiom is a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words. For example, "don't cry over spilled milk," or "the cat is out of the bag." Idioms are fun to use, and fun to hear - don't you agree? And
Ivor Moan explains how SAS Data Management software can help you address GDPR requirements.
When a busy university analytics team is tasked with creating a new, interactive way to share data with dozens of different constituents, data visualization from SAS is the obvious answer. The University of Idaho’s office of Institutional Effectiveness and Accreditation is the source for comprehensive information, analyses and university statistics.
In the Tuscan hilltop village of Montepulciano, a tourist can visit the shop of Coppersmith Cesare Mazzetti. But Mazzetti is not just running his family’s traditional business, he’s demonstrating all the qualities of a historic craftsman. The visitor may see him work and have him show you photographs of some of
Jim Harris explains why data quality is such a fundamental aspect of master data management.
May is Global Employee Health and Fitness Month (GEHFM) and to help recognize the efforts of getting {and keeping} employees happy, healthy and fit, SAS is hosting a 1 Day Clean Eating Challenge on Thursday, May 18th. (If you are participating in GEHFM activities, this counts as one point!)
A SAS customer asked how to simulate data from a three-parameter lognormal distribution as specified in the PROC UNIVARIATE documentation. In particular, he wanted to incorporate a threshold parameter into the simulation. Simulating lognormal data is easy if you remember an important fact: if X is lognormally distributed, then Y=log(X)
Water is in the news more & more lately - people seem to either have too much, or too little, at any given time. Therefore being able to plot rivers and lakes on a map could be a very useful skill to add to your graphical bag of tricks. A few
Recently, while browsing health care data, I came across the graph shown below. The graph includes the healthy life expectancy at birth by countries in the EU, along with the associated per capita expenditure. The graph also shows estimate of potential gain in life expectancy by increasing expenditure efficiency. The
When we built our house in Durham ten years ago, I asked the builder if I could make a special request. He was very accommodating. He said he had heard it all. “Can you install a switch to turn off the doorbell?” That he had not heard. His response, “Why
What do you get when you combine analytics, aviation and the Internet of Things? A learning experience that leaves everyone flying high! At Data on the Fly, 25 area high school students had the opportunity to learn how technology has changed – and continues to change – the aviation industry.
Microservices are a key component of the SAS Viya architecture. In this post, I’ll introduce and explain the benefits of microservices. In a future post we’ll dig deeper into the microservices architecture. What are microservices? When we look at SAS Viya architecture diagrams, we can find, among the new core components,
David Loshin discusses two common roadblocks in moving Hadoop from proof-of-concept to production.
Quick! What is the next term in the numerical sequence 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 4, ...? If you said '3', then you must be an American history expert, because that sequence represents the number of living US presidents beginning with Washington's inauguration on 30APR1789 and
In his recent article Perceptions of probability, Rick Wicklin explores how vague statements about "likeliness" translate into probabilities that we can express numerically. It's a fun, informative post -- I recommend it! You'll "Almost Certainly" enjoy it. To prepare the article, Rick first had to download the source data from
