I look forward to SAS Global Forum each year and this past conference ranked up that as one of the best I've ever attended. This year there were so many wonderful presentations, Super Demos and workshops on the topic of administration of SAS and the underlying hardware infrastructure needed for SAS
Data scientists are familiar with prototyping - we do this as part of a well-understood process to arrive at the optimum solution. But prototyping is more than about perfecting the math; it should also be about testing interpretability of the results. This need comes into stark prominence when you start
Let’s go back to 1976 for a moment. Did you know that was the year Muhammad Ali introduced a line of beauty products called “Knock Out?” And the hottest merchandise, including t-shirts, posters and even beanbags sported the character Arthur Fonzarelli (The Fonz) of TV’s “Happy Days.” But there was something
Throughout my 10 years at a leading direct marketing and CRM agency, a chief issue we solved for our clients was what we affectionately referred to as a spaghetti junction. It’s a nickname often given to a massively intertwined road traffic interchange that resembles a plate of spaghetti, like this
At some point, your business or IT leaders will decide – enough is enough; we can't live with the performance, functionality or cost of the current application landscape. Perhaps your financial services employer wants to offer mobile services, but building modern apps via the old mainframe architecture is impractical and a replacement
I recently read an article in which the winner of a Kaggle Competition was not shy about sharing his technique for winning not one, but several of the analytical competitions. “I always use Gradient Boosting,” he said. And then added, “but the key is Feature Engineering.” A couple days later,
I was a freshman in college the first time I saw the Cantor middle-thirds set and the related Cantor "Devil's staircase" function. (Shown at left.) These constructions expanded my mind and led me to study fractals, real analysis, topology, and other mathematical areas. The Cantor function and the Cantor middle-thirds
Let's continue now to Nikolaos Kourentzes' blog post on How to choose a forecast for your time series. Using a Validation Sample Nikos first discusses the fairly common approach of using a validation or "hold out" sample. The idea is to build your model based on a subset of the
Some of the most common questions from customers are about their analytics administration. Often regarded as house-keeping, administration failures can nevertheless cause real pain. The typical day-to-day tasks of analytics administration include checking availability and health of the analytics platform components, allocating proper resources for users like memory, file systems,
It’s no secret: here at SAS, we care about our customers. In fact, we care so much that we developed a program with that exact name: our SAS Cares program is here to help you with all things SAS! We know you may be so awesome that you never need
Nikolaos Kourentzes is Associate Professor at Lancaster University, and a member of the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting. In addition to having a great head of hair for a forecasting professor, Nikos has a great head for explaining fundamental forecasting concepts. In his recent blog post on How to choose a
As a hospice social worker I considered it one of my roles to remind patients and families to take moments to slow it down; to look around at the person they were about to lose and the people who were about to experience the loss. I knew it was time
Starting in 2018, IFRS 9 will require banks around the world to change their processes for accounting of credit risk. This new impairment standard will move banks from the backward looking incurred loss model into a forward looking Expected Credit Loss (ECL) modelling approach. When talking with banks around the
With the recent vote for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union being all over the news, I was a bit embarrassed to realize I didn't know exactly what areas are (and aren't) considered part of the UK. After a few Google searches, I found the following map on the
Over the last ten years, utilities around the world have have invested billions of dollars in the Internet of Things (IoT). Better known as smart grid and smart meter initiatives, this massive intelligent infrastructure is moving utilities into a future that’s beginning to look radically different from the century-old business model
Would you like to see the latest features of SAS Enterprise Guide in action? Of course you would! That's why it's well worth the 12 minutes of your time to watch this video from SAS Global Forum 2016. In the video, Casey Smith (SAS' R&D manager of the SAS Enterprise
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
'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.
