The holiday season is over – and you survived. You’ve made a lot of personal resolutions for 2017 - go to the gym, eat less sugar, save more money, visit Grandma more often. These are all great personal resolutions for 2017, but what about your analytics resolutions? If you are
.@philsimon looks at the challenges and opportunities that big data pose for data governance.
Axis tables enable you to combine tabular and graphical information into a single display. I love axis tables. My involvement with axis tables dates back over 30 years to their ancient predecessor, the table that contains an ASCII bar chart. In the mid 1980s, I created a table in PROC
Omnichannel shoppers have been disrupting retailers for years, and its likely to top the industry’s agenda of challenges for years to come. But optimization, an omnichannel analytics technology, can help harness the positives of omnichannel retailing and minimize showrooming. Consider this everyday retail dilemma: E-commerce sales are growing, but in-store
With the holidays, and all the tempting sweets and treats that come along with it, behind us, now is the perfect time to kick start the New Year with a clean slate. No matter what your goals or resolutions are this year, eating more fresh, whole foods is an excellent
Last week I wrote about the 10 most popular articles from The DO Loop in 2016. The popular articles tend to be about elementary topics that appeal to a wide range of SAS programmers. Today I present an "editor's choice" list of technical articles that describe more advanced statistical methods
Streaming technologies have been around for years, but as Felix Liao recently blogged, the numbers and types of use cases that can take advantage of these technologies have now increased exponentially. I've blogged about why streaming is the most effective way to handle the volume, variety and velocity of big data. That's
This is the fifth of the seven parts of blog post series “A practical guide to tackle auto insurance fraud”. In the first four articles of the series we drilled down to Data Management and Data Quality as the basis for fraud detection analytics, to Business Rules and Watch lists
In the beginning, SAS created procedures and output. The output was formless and void. Then SAS said, "Let there be ODS," and there was ODS. Customers saw that ODS was good, and SAS separated the computation from the display and management of output. The preceding paragraph oversimplifies the SAS Output
I've long been fascinated by both science and the natural world around us, inspired by the amazing Sir David Attenborough with his ever-engaging documentaries and boundless enthusiasm for nature, and also by the late, great Carl Sagan and his ground-breaking documentary series, COSMOS. The relationships between the creatures, plants and
Whether your resolution is to get SAS certified or to become a more advanced SAS programmer, we’ve got you covered with these new titles and upcoming SAS Press books, many of which will be making their bookshelf debut at SAS® Global Forum 2017 in Orlando, FL! Want to be notified when a new book
Strengthens arms, core and quadriceps; opens shoulders and chest while lengthening hamstrings (great pose for the entire body) Downward Facing Dog Pose (Sanskrit: Adho Mukha Svanasana) Come onto floor on hands and knees. Place knees directly below hips and hands slightly forward of shoulders. Spread palms, middle fingers parallel
Regardless of how long they’ve used the software, there’s no better event for SAS professionals than SAS Global Forum. The conference will attract thousands of users from across the globe and is an excellent place to network with and learn from users of all skill levels. To help those relatively
Happy New Year! We're switching things up this year, instead of a workout of the month, we're featuring a move of the month. We'll provide options that require equipment while others can be done anywhere. Refine your technique and try a new variation! Up first - SQUATS
“La Quinta” is Spanish for “next to Denny’s.” -- Mitch Hedberg, comedian Mitch Hedberg's joke resonates with travelers who drive on the US interstate system because many highway exits feature both a La Quinta Inn™ and a Denny's® restaurant within a short distance of each other. But does a
At SAS, we've published more repositories on GitHub as a way to share our open source projects and examples. These "repos" (that's Git lingo) are created and maintained by experts in R&D, professional services (consulting), and SAS training. Some recent examples include: sas_kernel, which provides Jupyter notebook support for SAS.
Much of my recent work has been along the theme of modernization. Analytics is not new for many of our customers, but standing still in this market is akin to falling behind. In order to continue to innovative and remain competitive, organizations need to be prepared to embrace new technologies
What are the most useful skills a data quality leader can possess? As an editor of an online data quality magazine, I naturally get asked this type of question regularly at events and meetups. My answer may surprise some who are expecting a data-centric response. I firmly believe that sales and
4 dominant trends can be distinguished in the development of Business Intelligence tools and in the way they are used in modern organisations. These trends will evolve into directions of development for these tools, changing their role in supporting decision processes and building competitive advantages. Trend 1: Self-service models The
If you do much traveling in the United States, you're bound to hear a few words and expressions that are unique to certain areas. Well y'all get ready, because I'm fixin' to analyze some of those words for ya! I recently found a really neat web application called The Great
In my last post, I showed you how to generate a word cloud of pdf collections. Word clouds show you which terms are mentioned by your documents and the frequency with which they occur in the documents. However, word clouds cannot lay out words from a semantic or linguistic perspective.
As the New Year has woven its way into our landscape, I think of the days that have vanished into the horizon. I’m reminded of how quickly the seasons pass and how synonymous they are with resolutions. We begin by planting seeds in the cool, moist soil. We tend our
I wrote 105 posts for The DO Loop blog in 2016. My most popular articles were about data analysis, SAS programming tips, and elementary statistics. Without further ado, here are the most popular articles from 2016. Data Analysis and Visualization Start with a juicy set of data and an interesting
.@philsimon says that privacy is your issue as well whether you believe it or not.
True confessions. I’ve been working here at SAS for 15+ years and I have never used the Recreation and Fitness Center. That’s not quite true. I frequently go there to get a diet lemonade or a cup of coffee if our machine is not working. I have picked up some discount movie
How many of you have been given a SAS data set with variables such as Age, Height, and Weight and some or all of them were stored as character values instead of numeric? Probably EVERYONE! Yes, we all know how to do the old "swap and drop" (rename and convert), but
Data analysis can be used for many things ... how about finding other beers you might like, so you don't keep drinking the same old brand every time? Hang on tight - I think we're about to make a beer run! I recently read an interesting article on the Flowingdata website,
This SAS Jedi is very excited about the SAS 9.4 M4 release, which brought many wonderful gifts just in time for Christmas. So in the interest of extending the Christmas spirit, I'm going to blog about some of my favorites! I've long loved the SAS DO statement variant which allows
In the previous three blogs in this series, we talked about what metadata can be available from source systems, transformation and movement, and operational usage. For this final blog in the series, I want to discuss the analytical usage of metadata. Let’s set up the scenario. Let's imagine I'm a
How can you generate data that contains outliers in a simulation study? The contaminated normal distribution is a simple but useful distribution you can use to simulate outliers. The distribution is easy to explain and understand, and it is also easy to implement in SAS. What is a contaminated normal
