Last week I read an interesting paper by Bob Rodriguez: "Statistical Model Building for Large, Complex Data: Five New Directions in SAS/STAT Software." In it, Rodriguez summarizes five modern techniques for building predictive models and highlights recent SAS/STAT procedures that implement those techniques. The paper discusses the following high-performance (HP)
This weekend I was reviewing my portfolio of stocks as usual. Yes, I do have a small stock portfolio with a few stocks, and normally I use free stock charting software to review the stock plots. These sites allow you to view the daily stock prices along with many technical
Slack is a tremendously popular app for team collaboration. At its core, it's an open messaging app that allows team members to communicate with each other in real time. It works well with "startup"-style teamwork, which requires constant communication among people who aren't always located together. I've heard a lot
The Internet of Things (or IoT, as some like to call it) holds a number of benefits for many organizations: revenue growth, smarter decision making and efficiency. Experts are predicting anywhere from 20 to 50 billion devices will be connected to the internet by 2020. That’s almost here! Are you
In DataFlux Data Management Studio, the predominate component of the SAS Data Quality bundle, the data quality nodes in a data job use definitions from something called the SAS Quality Knowledge Base (QKB). The QKB supports over 25 languages and provides a set of pre-built rules, definitions and reference data
With the Pokémon Go craze sweeping the world, techies and programmers are looking to apply their skills to gain an advantage over the average user. In this blog post, I show how to use some of SAS' geospatial analytics capabilities to capture a Pikachu. Let's say you know of a building that has
One of the things I’ve come to love most about DS2 is the tight integration with SQL which makes so many data prep chores so much less onerous. An example is DATA program BY group processing. With a traditional DATA step, you must first sort or index the source data
.@philsimon with some recommendations on modernization.
In June, my husband and I completed this silly race called Storm the Beach – totally out of my norm, it was only 5 miles :) and included things like climbing, crawling, wading through the ocean, balancing, rope swinging, and running through soft sand. It was nuts, but so fun, and
I'm addicted to you. You're a hard habit to break. Such a hard habit to break. — Chicago, "Hard Habit To Break" Habits are hard to break. For more than 20 years I've been putting semicolons at the end of programming statements in SAS, C/C++, and Java/Javascript. But lately I've been
What would it be like if the US was in the EU? I don't know how that would work out politically, but this map shows how it might look geographically (if the US was literally picked up and moved to Europe!) My buddy Rick Langston is a bit of a
At this stage, our organization has defined business objectives for Data Governance programme and shares business term definitions which it uses. This logical area of data and information management has been supplemented with a bridge to technical metadata – in the previous step we obtained one place, which combines the
The rapid growth of the digital economy has put it on course to account for 25 percent of the world’s entire economy by 2020. Platform business models represent a large proportion of the overall total but what do we mean by platform? MIT Professor Michael Cusumano defines it as follows:
Modernization is a term used to describe the necessary evolution of information technologies that organizations rely on to remain competitive in today’s constantly changing business world. New technologies – many designed to better leverage big data – challenge existing data infrastructures and business models. This forces enterprises to modernize their approach to data
One of my favorite new features in PROC SGPLOT in SAS 9.4m2 is addition of the COLORRESPONSE= and COLORMODEL= options to the SCATTER statement. By using these options, it is easy to color markers in a scatter plot so that the colors indicate the values of a continuous third variable.
Design thinking is, broadly speaking, allowing user experience, or even users, to drive design. It’s a profoundly human-centered process, with commentators using words like ‘collaborate’, ‘experience’, and even ‘empathy’ in their descriptions. Steve Jobs is said to have used it in creating the iPod and iPhone, because it brings together
As often is the case, this article is prompted by a recent post on the SAS/GRAPH and ODS Graphics page communities page. A user wanted to create a Graph Table showing a bar chart with tabular data for each of the category values along the x-axis. The user was creatively using
When you work out, you probably have a routine set of exercises that you do. But if you read health-and-fitness websites or talk to a personal trainer, you know that for optimal fitness, you should vary your workout routine. Not only does adding variety to your fitness regime help you
So, how many different Pokémon have you caught - and more importantly, how many different kinds are still out there that you haven't caught yet? I've created some graphs that might help you figure it out! I think my previous blog post might have irritated some of the hardcore Pokémon players out there
Powered in equal parts by data, mobility and innovation, the collaborative economy has changed the way we think about automobiles, travel accommodations, office space, living space – and so much more. When anyone can open an app to borrow money from a crowd, order a gourmet dinner from a neighbor, or rent an
Ever wondered about the relationship between radio-frequency identification (RFID) and the Internet of Things (IoT)? Radio-Frequency Identification is one of the many types of sensors that are bringing the IoT to life. They’re fully compatible with the Internet of Things at the most basic level. RFID technology provides a way of locating a
We all find change easier when it starts with something we’re familiar with. That’s why I think sports analytics examples are popular – most of us are sports fans, so we get it more easily. It’s also why automotive examples that illustrate the potential reach of the Internet of Things
Under-utilized technology creates a drag on an organization. The ability to get more out of the tools you already use can increase the value of an existing investment, and that value grows as processes become more efficient and decisions are based on firmer foundations. Consider the facilities engineer at an
Are you caught up in the recent Pokémon Go craze? Or maybe just trying to figure out what all the fuss is about? In this blog post, I try to analyze all the important Pokémon-related data in one graph! When the original Pokémon game first came out around 1995, you needed
Today is #EmbraceYourGeekness day, and you are either reveling in this new crazy town inhabited by Pokémon GO, or you are hiding in your house trying to avoid all of the Pokémon GO zombies wandering around. But since I'm living in SAS these days -- not just the place (at
In my last post, I started to look at the use of Hadoop in general and the data lake concept in particular as part of a plan for modernizing the data environment. There are surely benefits to the data lake, especially when it's deployed using a low-cost, scalable hardware platform.
Reporting can reveal last year’s graduation rates or this semester’s completion rates at a local community college. But drilling further into that data to ask why students aren’t graduating or why they aren’t enrolling requires more complex analysis. At Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, college administrators and professors are
Smoothies are a great way to pack a ton of nutrition into a refreshing, on-the-go glass. However, many “healthy” smoothies in reality are loaded with carbohydrates and sugar from tons of fruit as well as juice, honey, agave or possibly even sherbet or sorbet! Of course these smoothies taste fantastic
Last week I showed how to represent a Markov transition matrix in the SAS/IML matrix language. I also showed how to use matrix multiplication to iterate a state vector, thereby producing a discrete-time forecast of the state of the Markov chain system. This article shows that the expected behavior of
Using the past to predict the future is a time-honoured practice. Of course it can backfire — which is why financial services firms are required to inform us that ‘past performance is not a guide to future performance’ — but customer behavior is often remarkably consistent. Which is why the
