“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle, or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a
I recently read a very interesting article describing how analytics is being used to detect cheating/copying/re-use in crossword puzzle creation, in some of the major news publications. This inspired me to try my hand at creating a totally new & unique crossword puzzle ... of course using SAS software! :) My grandmother
NIJ's Real-Time Forecasting Challenge If you want to show off your forecasting chops, and maybe even make a little money, the National Institute of Justice has just the challenge for you. The NIJ's Real-Time Crime Forecasting Challenge: ...seeks to harness the advances in data science to address the challenges of
Welcome to the 1st practical step for tackling auto insurance fraud with analytics. It is obvious why our first stop relates with data, the idiom “the devil is in the details” can easily be applied in the insurance fraud sector as “the devil is in the data”. This article analyses
I recently celebrated my one year anniversary at SAS. I don’t use the word celebrated passively; there was delicious food, time for reflection, and of course selfies. I'm still in awe of this work environment and my awesome team. So what have I learned in this past year? Mayonnaise mixed
Just in time for the Strata + Hadoop World Conference, SAS became the first software vendor to achieve ODPi Interoperability with our Base SAS® and SAS/ACCESS® Interface to Hadoop products. Now, that's a lot to digest – so let me back up a second and give some background as to what this
Recently, I was talking to a director of analytics from a large telecommunications company, and I asked her, “Do you think we have a skills shortage?” She replied, “NO, I think we’re just looking in the wrong place.” I wanted to hear more as this analytics expert may have just
Are you ready to expand your programming skills and become a more versatile programmer? Then this new (and free!) course might be for you. SAS Programming for R Users is a free course aimed at helping R programmers who want to learn SAS. The goal is for you to be comfortable accomplishing
Over the past 37 years I've had the good fortune to be able to attend and present at hundreds of in-house, local, regional, special-interest and international SAS events. I am a conference junkie. I've not only attended thousands of presentations, Hands-On Workshops, tutorials, breakout sessions, quick tips, posters, breakfasts, luncheons,
My son is taking an AP Statistics course in high school this year. AP Statistics is one of the fastest-growing AP courses, so I welcome the chance to see topics and techniques in the course. Last week I was pleased to see that they teach data exploration techniques, such as
In the area of graphical visualization of data, Edward Tufte is a thought leader and has put forth many innovative ideas that enhance the understanding of the information in the graph with minimal distractions and potential for misinterpretation. One of his ideas has been the use of "Spark" plots. As per my
Every day, more than one hundred thousand SAS users visit our website looking for SAS information and resources. Given its importance to our user base, we’re constantly looking for ways to evolve the site. Over the next few months, you’ll notice changes to the support website, changes we believe will
What if you could predict with near-perfect accuracy what you’re going to sell and when your customer is going to buy? Right supply, right time is the goal German manufacturers have set themselves, without reducing the configuration options customers expect. Having almost completed stage 1 of their plan – changing
Last time I checked, there are well over 500 functions and call routines in SAS. I’ve taught SAS programming courses for 15 years, and I’ll admit that occasionally my students will ask me about a particular function that I have honestly never heard of. I remember the first time this
In my last post, we explored the operational facet of data governance and data stewardship. We focused on the challenges of providing a scalable way to assess incoming data sources, identify data quality rules and define enforceable data quality policies. As the number of acquired data sources increases, it becomes
I started young. Since I was 9 years old, I’ve always loved cooking delicious, tasty and healthy food, and feeding friends and family. My aunt still remembers the delicious chocolate soufflé that trembled and shook but would never collapse that I made for them when I was 18! Word spread.
In a previous blog post I explained how end users should code and use shared locations for SAS artifacts, to avoid issues in a SAS Grid Manager environment. Still, they could still fall in some sharing issues, which could have very obscure manifestations. For example, users opening SAS studio might notice
Although statisticians often assume normally distributed errors, there are important processes for which the error distribution has a heavy tail. A well-known heavy-tailed distribution is the t distribution, but the t distribution is unsuitable for some applications because it does not have finite moments (means, variance,...) for small parameter values.
I started out as a Psychology major. During my third year as an undergraduate, I was hired on as a research assistant for my advisor in her cognitive psychology lab. Through this and progressively more complicated psychological research experience, I quickly grew to love statistics. By the end of that
Data science may be a difficult term to define, but data scientists are definitely in great demand! Wayne Thompson, Senior Product Manager at SAS, defines data science as a broad field that entails applying domain knowledge and machine learning to extract insights from complex and often dark data. To further
When shopping for a new TV, with many sets next to each other across a store wall, it is easy to compare the picture quality and brightness. What is not immediately evident and expected is the difference between how the set looked in the store and how it looks in your
I am more than glad to invite you to join me in a series of posts related to a practical guide for tackling auto insurance fraud in the new era of data science and advanced analytics. Insurers are used to face a constant threat, a powerful enemy that never rests.
As I've previously written, data analytics historically analyzed data after it stopped moving and was stored, often in a data warehouse. But in the era of big data, data needs to be continuously analyzed while it’s still in motion – that is, while it’s streaming. This allows for capturing the real-time value of data
Last week, one of the major pipelines supplying gasoline to the eastern US broke. Do you know where the break is, and which states will be having shortages? Me neither! ... So, of course, I created a SAS map to help... First I read up about the spill on various
Wheat rust. You may have never heard of it, but in a matter of days, this fast-moving, silent-killing plant disease can completely annihilate a critical wheat farm in Ethiopia. Wheat rust’s newest nemeses? A legion of volunteer superheroes in the Data for Good movement. When Jake Porway, Founder and Executive
Analytics Experience 2016 featured more than 100 breakout sessions and talks covering numerous topics in big data. You can watch many of those talks from our Analytics Experience 2016 video portal, where select keynote and session talks are archived. To give you a taste of the content you'll find there, here’s a
Last week I showed how to compute nearest-neighbor distances for a set of numerical observations. Nearest-neighbor distances are used in many statistical computations, including the analysis of spatial point patterns. This article describes how the distribution of nearest-neighbor distances can help you determine whether spatial data are uniformly distributed or
I've created several hundred SAS graphs over the years. I was just musing to myself this morning how nicely Google lets me peruse through images of my graphs. And I thought some of you might also like to know how to do that... Most of you know how to search for keywords
If you use SAS® software to create a report that contains multiple graphs, you know that each graph appears on a separate page by default. But now you want to really impress your audience by putting multiple graphs on a page. Keep reading because this blog post describes how to
.@philsimon on the need to adopt agile methodologies for data prep and analytics.
