A long time ago, I worked for a company that had positioned itself as basically a third-party “data trust” to perform collaborative analytics. The business proposition was to engage different types of organizations whose customer bases overlapped, ingest their data sets, and perform a number of analyses using the accumulated
How often does a graph change the world? In 1854, Doctor John Snow produced a map to plotter cholera cases by drawing on a London map a bar for each reported death. Until then, it was believed that cholera was spread by miasma in the air, however, transmission method has
What would come to mind if you were told that you have to attend a SAS training course? Perhaps, you have a vision of an instructor sitting at the front of a classroom, endlessly reading PowerPoint slides verbatim in a monotonous voice while you sit there baffled, wondering what is
In a scatter plot, the regions where observations are packed tightly are areas of high density. A contour plot or heat map of a bivariate kernel density estimate (KDE) is one way to visualize regions of high density. A SAS customer asked whether it is possible to use SAS to
I’m an avid open water swimmer. In order to succeed in open water races I must do two things: I must sight properly in order to swim the straightest line possible in the right direction. The straighter the line, the less I have to swim. I must use a powerful,
Were you the kid who sat there analyzing the amusement park map before entering the park, planning out how you could visit the most rides in the least amount of time? If so, then this blog's for you, my data analyst kindred spirit! And to get you in the mood,
This week Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be nominated for president of the US by a major political party. Although this is a first for the US, many other countries have already passed this milestone. In fact, 60 countries have already elected women as presidents and prime ministers.
The way your graph looks can make all the difference ... two people can graph the exact same data in essentially the same way, but one of the two graphs can be perceived as much better than the other. Hopefully reading my blogs will help you create the better graph!
Why they will still play a valuable role in organizational data-management and -integration efforts.
First it was the patriarch of my favorite family. That shocking Red Wedding scene meant I could cross off several more characters I’d grown to love. When the season finale of Season 5 left me asking if we’d lost yet another one of my favorites, I wasn’t sure how much
Once upon a time, the only way to buy and sell advertising inventory was based on the relationship between advertiser and publisher. The exchange was manual, with advertisers paying publishers an agreed-upon price for every impression. The process involved a lot of phone calls, spreadsheets, negotiation and re-negotiation, all of
When social media first came along, there was a lot of hand-wringing about how this would see the end of face-to-face experiences. Everyone would be too immersed in digital technology to bother going out into the ‘real’ world. We would conduct our lives without leaving home, whether working or socializing.
Today, I was in a conversation about using Hadoop (a big data platform) for master data management (MDM). I still find it amazing when we have the discussion of what systems feed another system. Many of our friends have spent years creating MDM for customer, product, etc. with success. I'm a
In the spirit of our “40 and forward” theme to celebrate 40 years of SAS, this blog focuses on David Dickey, an accomplished SAS user since 1974 and a SAS instructor since 1981. He actually co-wrote the original Time Series SAS course in 1981, and helped with the most recent
Following a vegan diet? Allergic to eggs? Or in the middle of baking your favorite recipe only to realize you’re out of eggs? Fortunately, there are numerous egg substitutes you can use that you likely have in your pantry or fridge.
A kernel density estimate (KDE) is a nonparametric estimate for the density of a data sample. A KDE can help an analyst determine how to model the data: Does the KDE look like a normal curve? Like a mixture of normals? Is there evidence of outliers in the data? In
You've seen the terms #squadgoals or #lifegoals - to me, one #worklifebalancegoal is to be able to have time to volunteer outside of work. I could go on about the importance of service and how we are all connected but will have to save that soapbox for a different blog/time. From a happiness
In my last post, I talked about how to observe the impact of modernisation through a data quality lens. I asked you to consider the quality of your legacy data and what that means on the "shiny new toy" you intend to buy in the future. In this post, I
One of my favorite quotes is: "You can't believe everything you read on the Internet" - Abe Lincoln, 1868. And that is especially true when it comes to graphs and statistics. Hardly a day goes by without me seeing a bad graph that misrepresents the data (either intentionally or unintentionally) .
There was a recent comment on the original 'Unbox Your Box Plots', where a user wants to see the original data for the box, but only label the outliers. As noted in the comment, labeling all the scatter markers and turning on the outlier display is not ideal. But there
SAS Business Data Network is SAS’ solution for managing glossaries of common business terms. This is part of the SAS Data Governance offering as well as bundled with Advanced versions of all SAS Data Management bundles. One thing that is important regarding Data Governance in general, and this solution in
SAS is kicking off a new event Sept. 12-14 in Las Vegas called the Analytics Experience. It’s actually not completely new. In the past, we’ve held our annual Analytics and Premier Business Leadership Series conferences in the fall. But as the industry landscape continues to change – SAS continues to
Ever hear the phrase: "If the mountain won't come to you, you must go to the mountain"? Well, at SAS, we bring the mountain to you. The Analytics Fast Track™ for SAS®, affectionately called “rolling SAS,” is a partner program between SAS and Intel that showcases the incredible performance of
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
