This article is motivated by a recent question on the Communities Web Site on creating a scatter plot with additional summary information. Recently, I described how to create a scatter plot with a box overlay. While such graphs have been discussed in earlier posts, this article provided a visual benefit
Here in the US, it's the nationwide men's college basketball tournament season! Therefore let's use some data from the previous years' tournaments to sharpen our analytics & visualization skills... But before we get started, I must mention (brag?) that my alma mater, NC State University, won this tournament in 1983.
When senior leaders at the University of Louisville (UofL) approached Vice Provost Bob Goldstein in early April 2016 with a request for a fully functioning data visualization platform by start of the 2016 fall semester—just four months away—he did not panic. Instead, Goldstein, along with Becky Patterson, Executive Director of
Did you know that you can check a SAS macro variable to see if ODS graphics is enabled? The other day I wanted to write a SAS program that creates a graph only if ODS graphics is enabled. The solution is to check the SYSODSGRAPHICS macro variable, which is automatically
In a recent presentation, Jill Dyche, VP of SAS Best Practices gave two great quotes: "Map strategy to data" and "strategy drives analytics drives data." In other words, don't wait for your data to be perfect before you invest in analytics. Don't get me wrong -- I fully understand and
The rise of self-service analytics, and the idea of the ‘citizen data scientist’, has also brought a number of issues to the fore in organizations. In particular, two common areas of discussion are the twin pillars of data quality and data preparation. There is no doubt that good quality, well-prepared
SAS® users have an easy and convenient way to quickly obtain useful information (referred to as metadata) about their SAS session with a number of read-only SAS DICTIONARY tables or SASHELP views. At any time during a SAS session, information about currently defined system options, libnames, tables, columns and their
If you're a fan of SAS' ODS Graphics, you probably know that it does pretty much everything except geographical maps. But it's flexible enough that you can "fake it 'till you make it"! This example describes how to fake a geographical (choropleth) heat map using Proc SGplot polygons. In my
SAS will be well represented at the 2017 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research, which takes place April 2-4 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, NV. Two dozen SAS staff will participate in this conference. SAS/OR, the SAS Global Academic Program, and JMP will have adjacent and coordinated
The second round of the 2017 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament was an interesting one. Eight-seeded Wisconsin took out the reigning champion Wildcats, despite pundit predictions that Villanova could go all the way again. South Carolina, 24-10 in the SEC during the regular season, upset perennial favorite Duke by seven points.
Does age matter? Perhaps not, but maturity certainly does. The level of analytics maturity, in particular, makes a big difference to the options open to companies, and the strategies that they can adopt to get best value from analytics. A model of analytics maturity I like Thomas Davenport’s model of
The code clinic at SAS Global Forum 2017 $0 copay, no deductible. No waiting rooms, no outdated magazines. What kind of doctor’s office is this? While we might not be able to help with that nasty cough, SAS Code Doctors are here to help – when it comes to your
David Loshin extends his exploration of ethical issues surrounding automated systems and event stream processing to encompass data quality and risk considerations.
With new health recommendations suggesting 8-10 servings of low carbohydrate vegetables daily, it’s been exciting to see how the creative foodie community is using vegetables in place of high carb starches in recipes. If you haven’t heard, cauliflower rice is the newest kid on the block. The premise behind the
Prior to SAS/IML 14.2, every variable in the Interactive Matrix Language (IML) represented a matrix. That changed when SAS/IML 14.2 (released with SAS 9.4m4) introduced two new data structures: data tables and lists. This article gives an overview of data tables. I will blog about lists in a separate article.
In just a few short months the European General Data Protection Regulation becomes enforceable. This regulation enshrines in law the rights of EU citizens to have their personal data treated in accordance with their wishes. The regulation applies to any organisation which is processing EU citizens’ data, and the UK
Innovation and transformation of established companies needs to be through a collaborative model. Done right, it can be profitable for all players. I have always thought that human evolution and development is one of the most interesting and challenging processes in the world, especially in terms of innovation and investing.
If you give an artist some tools, they can create a pretty picture. Sure, they might have a preferred tool - but they can probably do a pretty decent job no matter what you give them (paint, colored pencils, watercolor, charcoal, etc). And creating pretty graphs in SAS is no
Part 504 of the US Department of Financial Services Superintendent’s Regulations seems to significantly up the requirements for firms to conduct ongoing review and continuously improve their approach to anti-money laundering (AML) monitoring. But is it really very different from the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force's broader suggestions to introduce
Questions about the regulatory regime related to the 4th and 5thEU Anti-Money Laundering (AML) directives are among the most frequent ones we have been getting this quarter. There can be no question that businesses are responding to increased regulations and in turn, driving demand for anti-money laundering technology to support
Let’s look at the term “accessible” and how it relates to the SAS world. Accessible output is output that can be read by a screen reader to someone with low or no vision, visualized by someone with low vision or color blindness, or navigated by someone with limited mobility. In
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you've surely noticed the increasing numbers of headlines about big data, Hadoop, internet of things (IoT) and, of course, data streaming. For many companies, this next generation of data management is clearly marked "to play with later." That's because adopting the next wave
SAS formats are very useful and can be used in a myriad of creative ways. For example, you can use formats to display decimal values as a fraction. However, SAS supports so many formats that it is difficult to remember details about the format syntax, such as the default field
Quality in every thought, every action, every outcome You might think differentiating on the quality of your products is a no-brainer – who wouldn’t seek to make every product incredibly high quality? Yet experience shows us that many manufacturers only capture data from the production line. While this approach creates
Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of articles to help current SAS programmers add SAS Viya to their analytics skillset. In this post, Advisory Solutions Architect Steven Sober explores how to accomplish distributed data management using SAS Viya. Read additional posts in the series. In my last article I
I’m drawn to immersive analytics (IA) because it covers areas I’ve been looking at since 2012, and have been publishing on since early 2014, like virtual reality and data worlds. I’m retroactively applying the cool new term IA (not to be confused with AI for artificial intelligence) to all of my activities
Community detection has been used in multiple fields, such as social networks, biological networks, tele-communication networks and fraud/terrorist detection etc. Traditionally, it is performed on an entity link graph in which the vertices represent the entities and the edges indicate links between pairs of entities, and its target is to
As a SAS instructor, I’m often on the road, but, in April, my work travel path is going to take me to a place I haven’t visited since I was 12 years old. The occasion? SAS Global Forum 2017. The location? Walt Disney World® in Orlando. While the main conference
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of articles to help current SAS programmers add SAS Viya to their analytics skillset. In this post, Advisory Solutions Architect Steven Sober explores how to accomplish distributed data management using SAS Viya. Read additional posts in the series. This article in the SAS
When we send spacecraft from Earth to Mars, do the Martians consider them to be UFOs? I might not be able to answer that question definitively ... but I do have some really cool graphs showing the data for all those missions to Mars! You might remember a previous blog
