Electronic health records (EHRs) and the overall advancement of information technology have produced a tsunami of data that must be stored, managed and used. Some had naively hoped that EHRs would bring a simpler, more streamlined industry. Instead, we’re finding that the delivery and management of health care is more
Being an Eagle Scout, the data for good movement caught my attention. I wondered if I could apply my computer skills in a way that might help. How about showing people better ways to visualize HIV/AIDS data - that might help doctors better understand the data, and therefore better treat
Occasionally on a discussion forum, a statistical programmer will ask a question like the following: I am trying to fit a parametric distribution to my data. The sample has a long tail, so I have tried the lognormal, Weibull, and gamma distributions, but nothing seems to fit. Please help!! In
SAS Community member @tc (a.k.a. Ted Conway) has found a new toy: ODS Graphics. Using PROC SGPLOT and GTL (Graph Template Language), along with some creative data prep steps, Ted has created several fun examples that show off what you can do with a bit of creativity, some math knowledge,
With DataFlux Data Management 2.7, the major component of SAS Data Quality and other SAS Data Management solutions, every job has a REST API automatically created once moved to the Data Management Server. This is a great feature and enables us to easily call Data Management jobs from programming languages
One request came in for the previous article on Circle link graph, for the addition of arrow heads to indicate the direction of the flow. Given that I am using a SERIES plot to render the links, it is relatively easy to add arrow heads to the links as the SERIES
.@philsimon says that even seemingly useless information can be useful under the right circumstances.
Everyone all sugared up? I remember the annual scene of Halloween night as my sister and I shed our costumes, poured our loot onto the living room floor and began the negotiations. Fortunately, I was partial to the chewy fruity candies and and she was partial to chocolate. The only chocolate bar I was
What would happen if we could ask any type of scientific or clinical question about patients, and then go out and find the data to answer our questions? With "real-world data," we can do just that. Real-world data is all medicinal product data that comes from real-life patients. In contrast,
Many people have the perception that data governance is all about policies and mandates, committees and paperwork, without any real "rubber on the road" impact. I want to dispel this viewpoint by sharing a simple example of how one company implemented data governance to enforce something practical that delivered long-term
Every year near Halloween I write an article in which I demonstrate a simple programming trick that is a real treat to use. This year's trick (which features the CMISS function and the crossproducts matrix in SAS/IML) enables you to count the number of observations that are missing for pairs
There has been some interest in "Circle Link Graph" diagrams where the nodes are laid out in a circle, with links going from one node in the circle to another. I recall seeing one diagram during the 2014 World Cup Soccer tournament, showing the number of players from one country that
Halloween appears to be my favorite holiday, because I seem to have more graphs related to it than any of the others. And since Halloween is just a few days away, I thought you might like an easy way to see all those graphs. Here's are links to my previous Halloween-related blog
In my prior posts about operational data governance, I've suggested the need to embed data validation as an integral component of any data integration application. In my last post, we looked at an example of using a data quality audit report to ensure fidelity of the data integration processes for
I've been reflecting on my life and career recently and was amazed to discover that I just hit 30 years of working with industrial and manufacturing applications. While it’s a bit tough to admit my age, I’m quite happy with my career and have enjoyed manufacturing and industrial applications. I
Aphorism 6: The Surest Way to Get a Better Forecast is to Make the Demand Forecastable Forecast accuracy is largely dependent on volatility of demand, and demand variation is affected by our own organizational policies and practices. So an underused yet highly effective solution to the forecasting problem can be
Consumers want content 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all around the world. It's a tall order for media & entertainment (M&E) companies and a 180 degree shift from days past. How do they provide enough content to meet demand? Audiences are binge watching over-the-top (OTT) programming, creating
Like unexpectedly seeing this beautiful bird in nature, SAS has tons of free goodies you might be surprised to encounter as you explore your software. A user asked me how to find products licensed at their workplace and that's how this informative blog got started. While individual organizations may have
Aphorism 3: Organizational Policies and Politics Can Have a Significant Impact on Forecasting Effectiveness We just saw how demand volatility reduces forecastability. Yet our sales, marketing, and financial incentives are usually designed to add volatility. We reward sales spikes and record weeks, rather than smooth, stable, predictable growth. The forecast
Cancer is a pretty scary word and is something that affects most of us, either directly or indirectly. It is a complex condition with possible causes including: poor diet, environmental toxins, genetics, infections, viruses, stress, tobacco use, lack of exercise and more. While no one knows the exact cause of
When simulating data or testing algorithms, it is useful to be able to generate patterns of missing data. This article shows how to generate random and systematic patterns of missing values. In other words, this article shows how to replace nonmissing data with missing data. Generate a random pattern of
The State Fair in North Carolina is just a few miles from SAS headquarters, and therefore it's virtually impossible for it to slip by without me noticing it. There are two aspects of the fair that usually get lots of news coverage - what's the latest fair-food, and did we
.@philsimon says that data-governance professionals will need to be more agile than ever.
This is the third of the seven parts of blog post series “A practical guide to tackle auto insurance fraud”. In the first two articles of the series we drilled down to Data Management and Data Quality as the basis for insurance fraud detection analytics and also to the Business
SAS Enterprise Guide has come a long way since version 1.0 was released in 1999! Are any of you original users that remember the Help characters, Clippy, Peedy or Merlin? I was working as a statistician for another company that year, and I attended a SAS user group meeting where
The Aphorisms of the New Defensive Paradigm I want to finish this blog series with a set of 7 aphorisms – concise statements of principle – that characterize the new Defensive paradigm for business forecasting. The first is that: Aphorism 1: Forecasting is a Huge Waste of Management Time This
A Spider Plot is another way of presenting the Change from Baseline for tumors for each subject in a study by week. The plot can be classified by response and stage. Another way of displaying Tumor Response data was discussed earlier in the article on Swimmer Plot. This article is prompted
Requirements that are the most easily described can often be the most difficult to implement. I’m referring to requests like: Display a gauge with the most recently collected metric. Plot a 18 month rolling window of profit. Display last month’s products percent of total metrics for visual comparison. Okay, so
Analytics provides better insights into why something happened, or helps provide decision makers with information about what will happen in the future. That allows organizations to act now to improve outcomes instead of reacting to events after they happen. But it takes more than analytics alone. Achieving this level of
Living to 100 isn't as simple as just paying a certain amount of money for your healthcare. But that is an interesting aspect of longevity, so let's have a look at the data ... In my previous blog post, we analyzed how much people from various countries spend on healthcare.
