While men still outnumber women in the analytics field, there are plenty of opportunities available for women. At a recent Chief Data and Analytics forum, I was encouraged to see a well-balanced number of senior executives presenting about the business of analytics. Speakers included 12 women and 14 men, which indicates a
Last week I had the pleasure of presenting my paper "Graphs are Easy with SAS 9.4" at the Boston SAS Users Group meeting. The turn out was large and over 75% of the audience appeared to be using SAS 9.4 back home. This was good as my paper was focused on the cool new
I was with my two grown sons and their spouses this past month for a family wedding. I have to say that they have turned out well. They seem to have great relationships with their spouses and children; they are working productively in their fields of interest; they care about
Like many words, if you just say "Cat 5" different people might think you're talking about different things. Computer geeks might assume you're talking about category 5 network cabling. But around this time of the year, most people in the southeast US will probably assume you're talking about a category
.@philsimon asks, Rather than trying to tackle a new form of governance, wouldn't your organization do better to shore up its existing data-governance practices?
The recent releases of SAS 9.4 have featured major enhancements to the ODS statistical graphics procedures such as PROC SGPLOT. In fact, PROC SGPLOT (and the underlying Graph Template Language (GTL)) are so versatile and powerful that you might forget to consider whether you can create a graph automatically by
With today’s customers able to access rich sources of product and service information – especially pricing data – when they are mobile, retailers are being forced to innovate in the way they capture consumers’ attention. Unfortunately, attention spans are rapidly decreasing to just the few seconds that a user spends
Did you know that socks are one of the most needed but least donated items at homeless shelters? Or that 4,000 people will experience homelessness each year in Wake County alone? To bring awareness to this need and to encourage YOU to make a difference by donating socks to your local
Jared Cohen, President of Jigsaw, formerly Google Ideas, and Chief Advisor to Alphabet Executive Chairman (former Google CEO) Eric Schmidt, presented a very interesting keynote at Analytics Experience this month. In it he mentioned the idea of a ‘digital self’. He explained most people have not one but numerous digital
At SAS, we use terms like “machine learning,” “predictive modeling” and, of course, “analytics” quite a bit in our day-to-day business. Not surprising, given that we're the largest analytical software vendor out there. But have you noticed that these terms are popping up more frequently in news articles and blogs?
Start with the end in mind -- wise words that apply to everything, and in the world of big data it means we have to change the way we look at managing the data we have. There was a time when we managed data quality, and the main goal was
In a number of my previous blogs I have discussed auditing within a SAS environment and how to identity who has accessed data or changed reports. For many companies keeping an audit trail is very important. If you’re an administrator in your environment and auditing is important at your organization,
We've witnessed a significant rise in data governance adoption in recent years. Careers, technology, education, frameworks, practitioners – there's growth in all aspects of the discipline. Regulatory compliance across many sectors is a typical driver for data governance. But I also believe one of the main reasons is the realisation by
Similar to hunting for Mewtwo (Pokémon), identifying and recruiting talented data scientists is just as elusive. CIMB decided that the best way would be to bring budding data scientist together for a challenge. This will provide candidates the opportunity to win cash prizes along with potential employment with CIMB’s Decision
SAS Programming Professionals, SAS & bugs & rock & roll? But, of course! SAS Because of its amazing versatility, SAS is indisputably the greatest software package currently in use anywhere within the Milky Way Galaxy. Can SAS input every type of flat file imaginable? Yes! Can SAS read and write
With the first debate between the two candidates behind us and the culmination of the US presidential election drawing near, who wouldn’t love to predict the winner? I don't have a crystal ball, but I do have the power of unstructured text analytics at my fingertips. With the help of
As a nutritionist, I have consulted with many clients over the years about how to eat to improve their health. Since every individual has different nutritional needs based on their genetics, lab results and current lifestyle, each nutrition consult is different than the one before. In addition, nutrition messages have
Last week I showed how to find the nearest neighbors for a set of d-dimensional points. A SAS user wrote to ask whether something similar could be done when you have two distinct groups of points and you want to find the elements in the second group that are closest
With my first open source software (OSS) experience over a decade ago, I was ecstatic. It was amazing to learn how easy it was to download the latest version on my personal computer, with no initial license fee. I was quickly able to analyse datasets using various statistical methods. Organisations
“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
