The pros and cons of data on demand
Phil Simon chimes in on the immediacy of enterprise data.
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Are more women getting STEM degrees?
For the past several years, efforts have been under way to recruit more women into the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. I recently saw an interesting graph showing the percentage of bachelor's degrees conferred to women in the US, and I wondered if I could tweak that graph
Machine learning best practices: the basics
I started my training in machine learning at the University of Tennessee in the late 1980s. Of course, we didn’t call it machine learning then, and we didn’t call ourselves data scientists yet either. We used terms like statistics, analytics, data mining and data modeling. Regardless of what you call
5 questions about artificial intelligence with Intel's Pat Richards
Artificial intelligence promises to transform society on the scale of the industrial, technical, and digital revolutions before it. Machines that can sense, reason and act will accelerate solutions to large-scale problems in myriad of fields, including science, finance, medicine and education, augmenting human capability and helping us to go further,
Is Grass Fed Worth It?
By now most of us have heard about grass-fed beef and dairy, but you may still be confused about what that really means and if the benefits are worth the extra cost. First let me point out that “organic” has nothing to do with whether an animal product is grass
The bias-corrected and accelerated (BCa) bootstrap interval
I recently showed how to compute a bootstrap percentile confidence interval in SAS. The percentile interval is a simple "first-order" interval that is formed from quantiles of the bootstrap distribution. However, it has two limitations. First, it does not use the estimate for the original data; it is based only
Basic ODS Graphics: Enabling, Selecting and Displaying Graphs
This post presents some basic aspects of ODS Graphics: enabling, selecting, and displaying graphs.
U.S. CO2 emissions are on the decline!
Carbon Dioxide ... CO2. Humans breathe out 2.3 pounds of it per day. It's also produced when we burn organic materials & fossil fuels (such as coal, oil, and natural gas). Plants use it for photosynthesis, which in turn produces oxygen. It is also a greenhouse gas, which many claim
Family Vacation: Restoration for all
I don't have a big vacation planned this summer. Don't feel sorry for me... I am going to Germany for a week in October and on Friday I leave for my second weekend at the beach. I have recently been reading about what makes a vacation "restorative". There is some cool
Diary of an AI webinar
Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, many SAS customers who've been using our analytics capabilities for years or even decades are asking: What can we do with AI? What exactly is AI from a software perspective? How can we infuse cognitive computing into our customer interactions and on the customer
SAS Viya 3.2: Visual Data Builder
In SAS Viya 3.2, SAS Visual Data Builder provides a mechanism for performing simple, self-service data preparation tasks for SAS Visual Analytics or other applications. SAS Visual Data Builder is NOT an Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) or data quality tool. You may still need one of those tools to
Does Hadoop equal big data? What else does big data mean?
Joyce Norris-Montanari explains why it's so important to pick the right tools to manage your big data.
Bootstrap estimates in SAS/IML
I previously wrote about how to compute a bootstrap confidence interval in Base SAS. As a reminder, the bootstrap method consists of the following steps: Compute the statistic of interest for the original data Resample B times from the data to form B bootstrap samples. B is usually a large
2017 SAS/IIF forecasting research grants
For the fifteenth year, the International Institute of Forecasters, in collaboration with SAS®, is proud to announce research grants for how to improve forecasting methods and business forecasting practice. The award for the 2017-2018 year will be two $5,000 grants, in Business Applications and Methodology. Criteria for the award of
Equity in education: Rural teaching opened my eyes to district disparities
Two of my colleagues have shared their experiences as a statistic and a child who could have been left behind. I too have my own story that helped drive my passion. All of us define equity in different ways. Equity is a concept that is hard to define, and we
Meet student enrollment goals by optimizing your financial aid strategy
For colleges and universities, awarding financial aid today requires sophisticated analysis. When higher education leaders ask, “How can we use financial aid to help meet our institutional goals?” they need to consider many scenarios to balance strategic enrollment goals, student need, and institutional finances in order to optimize yield and
Parighasana: July Yoga Pose of the Month
Lengthens inner thigh and side waist. Engages core and lengthens spine while opening chest, arms and shoulders. Gate Pose (Sanskrit: Parighasana) Begin on mat kneeling with toes curled under and torso lengthened with crown reaching tall. Extend your right leg out to the right and press your entire foot into
Image backgrounds
As many of the regular readers of this blog know, SGPLOT and GTL, provide extensive tools to build complex graphs by layering plot statements together. These plots work with axes, legends and attribute maps to create graphs that can scale easily to different data. There are, however, many instances where
Are you getting the most out of consumer IoT data?
In an IoT world, everything is connected. But what does it mean to be connected? Does it mean being plugged in to your phone, car, home, TV, favorite apps and retailers? Does it mean knowing what’s happening all around you? And having the “things” you’re connected to acting as recommender
How to use regularization to prevent model overfitting
When building models, data scientists and statisticians often talk about penalty, regularization and shrinkage. What do these terms mean and why are they important? According to Wikipedia, regularization "refers to a process of introducing additional information in order to solve an ill-posed problem or to prevent overfitting. This information usually
10 Commandments of Applied Econometrics or how not to sin when working with real data – Part 5
In the fourth post of the 10 Commandments of Applied Econometrics series we discussed the issues of keeping the solutions sensibly simple and applying model validation. Today, I will present another commandment related to data mining techniques. Use data mining reasonably. In the econometric community, data mining is a controversial and highly emotional
Menopause: Evolution of the Goddess Within
Is this menopause? Maybe you've noticed some changes. Perhaps it’s the occasional hot flushed feeling that erupts like a volcano or maybe it's the irregular periods when you’ve always been like clockwork. Although menopause is often thought of as a singular event, it isn’t unless you are undergoing chemotherapy that
Need faster analytics? Modernize your data management platform.
Helmut Plinke explains why modernizing your data management is essential to supporting your analytics platform.
Test for the equality of two proportions in SAS
A SAS customer asked how to use SAS to conduct a Z test for the equality of two proportions. He was directed to the SAS Usage Note "Testing the equality of two or more proportions from independent samples." The note says to "specify the CHISQ option in the TABLES statement
Fun with Flags: Optimizing Arrangements of Stars with SAS
Tomorrow is Independence Day, a federal holiday in the United States. Flags are displayed everywhere, especially in Washington, D.C., where I live. So let's have a little Fun with Flags! The current U.S. flag has 50 stars, one per state, with five rows of six stars interleaved with four rows
Powerful storytelling for tech
When I arrived for a training course with the name, "Powerful storytelling for tech," I was surprised to discover that most of the attendees worked in sales, rather than the marketing and communications crowd I'd been expecting. They were all there to learn how best to engage prospects – how
Ten SAS Enterprise Guide program editor tricks
If you spend a lot of time in SAS Enterprise Guide (as I do), you probably get to know its features pretty well. But we don't always take the time to explore as we should, so there might be a few golden nuggets of editor knowledge that have escaped you
The Value of a Summer Job
My colleague, Lisa, and I were comparing notes the other day. Both of us starting working in our teens (14 and 15 respectively) during the academic year as well as the summers. I worked at Sears in the drapery and bedspread department. I’ll never forget my first boss—Mr. Arnold. He
Move of the month - Kettlebell Clean
The Kettlebell (KB) clean is a multi-joint movement that incorporates a squat, a pull, and shoulder rotation. You will work to maximize momentum generated in the lower body to use your upper body while challenging core stability. This exercise requires a little coordination and precision, so take your time learning
Summary statistics and t tests in SAS
Students in introductory statistics courses often use summary statistics (such as sample size, mean, and standard deviation) to test hypotheses and to compute confidence intervals. Did you know that you can provide summary statistics (rather than raw data) to PROC TTEST in SAS and obtain hypothesis tests and confidence intervals?