More and more organizations are considering the use of maturing scalable computing environments like Hadoop as part of their enterprise data management, processing and analytics infrastructure. But there's a significant difference between the evaluation phase of technology adoption and its subsequent production phase. This seems apparent in terms of how organizations are
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'Tis a gift to be simple. -- Shaker hymn In June 2015 I published a short article for Significance, a magazine that features statistical and data-related articles that are of general interest to a wide a range of scientists. The title of my article is "In Praise of Simple Graphics."
Recently, I needed to view the list of products with the highest number of defects. I have a data set of defects reported against various products. The data set has over 30 products, and each observation contains the product name, name of the primary support person, and other relevant details of
One thing that we have a lot of at SAS: installations of SAS software that we can run. I have SAS for Windows on my laptop, and I have access to many centralized instances of SAS that run on Linux and Windows servers. (I also have access to mainframe SAS,
XML has become one of the major standards for moving data across the Internet. Some of XML’s strengths are the abilities to better describe data and to be more extensible than any of its predecessors such as CSV. Due to the increased popularity of XML for moving data, I provide
For banks across Asia and Europe, a new accounting standard is of increasing importance – IFRS 9. With the first IFRS 9 reporting deadline looming January 1, 2018, banks are trying to understand what they need to do to be ready. At its core, the IFRS 9 accounting standard introduces
When I joined SAS nearly 32 years ago, I didn’t set out to be its first Chief Customer Officer (CCO). I made it here by setting small goals for myself over the years, sharing those goals and attaining them step by step. It’s been a lot like training for a
Cities must work with companies, universities, other cities and organizations to truly realize the Smart Cities vision. This was a consistent message at last week’s Smart Cities Innovation Summit, where leaders from more than 200 cities met with technology and service providers and academics to talk about new innovations that
Let's create a souped-up SAS map that can track Zika-carrying mosquitoes down to the county level, in the US! A few months ago, I wrote a blog post with a world map of documented locations of the Aedes mosquitoes that could carry the Zika virus. The world map showed a high concentration
For those of us who haven’t been hermits stuck in a remote section of Middle Earth, The Lord of the Rings book and movie series brought to our awareness the mythical powers of The One Ring: An object with a sinister inscription that reads “One Ring to Rule Them All.”
The “big” part of big data is about enabling insights that were previously indiscernible. It's about uncovering small differences that make a big difference in domains as widespread as health care, public health, marketing and business process optimization, law enforcement and cybersecurity – and even the detection of new subatomic particles.
Optimization for machine learning is essential to ensure that data mining models can learn from training data in order to generalize to future test data. Data mining models can have millions of parameters that depend on the training data and, in general, have no analytic definition. In such cases, effective models
The Internet of Things (IoT) is drastically changing our lives, whether this is at home, in the car, at work or even in the street. Gartner has predicted that by 2020, 20.8 billion devices will be connected. Moreover, the potential economic impact of IoT by 2025 is estimated to be
What's more, CXOs who believe that they can substitute data scientists for real data integration are as foolish as the duffer who consistently uses the wrong club.
It’s hard to pick up a medical journal or news article these days without reading something about the gut microbiome. Thanks to the NIH Human Microbiome Project established in 2008, health professionals and the general public have learned much about the link between the condition of our gut microbiome and
Graphs enable you to visualize how the predicted values for a regression model depend on the model effects. You can gain an intuitive understanding of a model by using the EFFECTPLOT statement in SAS to create graphs like the one shown at the top of this article. Many SAS regression
Report designers often discover after aggregating data by groups in the Visual Analytics Designer that it would also be nice to see additional aggregations of the data, for example, a maximum or minimum of that sum across groups. This means creating an ‘aggregation of an aggregation.’ If you plan your report objectives in
One of our country's oldest institutions, the U.S. Census Bureau, is at the forefront of modern government efforts. Those efforts are numerous and disparate, from general directives to do more with less, to digitization and consolidation initiatives, to the “Cloud First” mandate, and the pushes for agile and open source development.
In recent years, more and more people have been registering as independent voters in the US, rather than Democrat or Republican - the independents now control well over 1/3 of the votes. Will they likely vote for the Democrat or Republican candidates in the upcoming election? Let's break down some numbers
Having introduced the term of Data Governance and defined business objectives, we can start to fulfill the first tasks within Data Governance programme construction. Step 1: business meaning of data While conducting their activity, organizations use many industry-specific terms. The mere definition of who a customer is for the company
As we are all well aware, providing caregiving for our parent(s) is complicated and messy. Siblings can often be both a blessing and a curse in this process, providing much needed relief and support, or perhaps creating additional stress and barriers to important decisions and resources. Why is this the
At the most recent SAS Global Forum in Las Vegas, I gave a demo on using SAS/OR to compute an optimal strategy for the casino game blackjack. For anyone who wasn't able to attend, I'd like to show some of the code and results here.
Fellow Roundtable writer David Loshin has commented in the past that: "MDM is popular because it is presented as a cure-all solution to all data problems in the organization." Many people see master data management (MDM) as the silver bullet to all of their business and data woes. But in
Some estimates suggest that the number of connected objects will be more than 50 billion by 2020. Each of us will own between six and 10 connected objects. But what exactly is the Internet of Things (IoT)? Wikipedia describes it as “the network of physical objects — devices, vehicles, buildings
There was this very embarrassing day around year six of my career as a statistician working in clinical trials. I had a small group of interns working on a project that combined data from multiple clinical trials. The goal was to better understand sources of variation in the common control
Every beginning SAS programmer learns the simple IF-THEN/ELSE statement for conditional processing in the SAS DATA step. The basic If-THEN statement handles two cases: if a condition is true, the program does one thing, otherwise the program does something else. Of course, you can handle more cases by using multiple
A Turnip Graph displays the distribution of an analysis variable. The graph displays markers with the same (or close) y coordinate by displaying the markers spread out over the x-axis range in a symmetric pattern. Recently, a question was posted on the SAS Communities page regarding such a graph. Here is an example of
The summer games have all the elements of a great story—power, drama, intrigue, and the key moment when one team rises above the rest and is dressed in gold. I guess I can’t help but love the games -- and as a professional communicator, I can’t resist a great story.
.@philsimon on whether organizations need MDM to gather valuable insights about their customers.
Here in the US, our July 4th Independence Day holiday is coming up. It's a festive holiday with lots of fun & fireworks, but you also need to also be careful ... and I've got the graphs to prove it! Last year, I wrote a blog post about a SAS