Music is the beat of my life! Ever since I was little I was dancing around the house and singing. Remember when you could go to an amusement park and do a video while lip syncing? That’s right – me at about 9 or 10 years old singing and dancing
Early last year I wrote an article on how to create the "Most Frequent Adverse Events Sorted by Relative Risk" graph using the SGPLOT procedure. The key issue here is that such a graph normally displays two plots side by side, a scatter plot of the proportion values by treatment
The INFORMS 2015 Annual Meeting will be held in Philadelphia November 1-4. More than two dozen SAS staff will participate, and SAS will have three adjacent booths representing SAS/OR (and all of Advanced Analytics), JMP, and the SAS Global Academic Program. SAS is well-represented among the presentations at this meeting,
Similar to claims fraud, money laundering is seen as a victimless crime, and often glamorized in movies and books. Think “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Scarface”. But money laundering is a SERIOUS problem. According to a 2013 report, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that $1.6
Is your LASR implementation running short on memory? Since LASR tables are stored in memory, it can become scarce. So what can we do to minimize LASR table size and still get LASR’s legendary performance? Here are a few strategies on how to shrink LASR tables: Compression: When compression was
Population movement is higher than ever. Buoyed by freedom of movement and critical events such as armed conflict and the European migrant issue, large groups of people are migrating across borders. In fact, population movement has now reached record levels. There are currently more displaced people globally than during the whole
Every year near Halloween I write a trick-and-treat article in which I demonstrate a simple programming trick that is a real treat to use. This year's trick features two of my favorite functions, the CUSUM function and the LAG function. By using these function, you can compute the rows of
With the 2015 World Series currently underway, there couldn't be a more exciting time to discuss how analytics is transforming the game of baseball. It comes as no surprise to say that managers and front office executives, not to mention the players, are continuously looking for a competitive advantage over their opponents.
Choosing the perfect Halloween costume can be a tough decision ... especially when it comes to choosing between two awesome favorites like Superman & Batman!?! I think we're gonna need a bigger boat! (and by 'boat' I mean analytical software, of course!) Let's start with Superman. This character has been around since
I recently met SAS user "CSC" at the Analytics 2015 conference. It might be generous to say that he's an avid user of SAS Enterprise Guide; it's probably more accurate to say that he's now accustomed to the tool and he's once again productive. But he still misses some features
Every new piece of technology today can be rooted back to the creation of the iPhone, and it’s what David Pogue, Author, Host of NOVA ScienceNow and Yahoo Tech Columnist, calls the singular invention that caused the greatest gap between generations. While its touchscreen, audio, video, Wi-Fi, GPS, wireless antenna
Revenue management is a relatively young discipline in the hotel industry. Hotels only started to broadly adopt revenue management processes and systems in the late 90s and early 2000s. While the discipline has achieved success and gained visibility over the last decade and a half, it is still relatively new
.@philsimon on the soft skills that Big Data requires.
As I continue to apply analytics to various aspects of Halloween, I turn my attention to planning my trick-or-treat route ... Random picture: Here's a shot of my friend Sara's trick-or-treat crew. With tiny legs, and huge loads of candy, having an efficient route is very important! :) I started by
SAS 9.4 M3, introduces a new procedure named PROC SQOOP. This procedure enables users to access an Apache Sqoop utility from a SAS session to transfer data between a database and HDFS. Using SAS PROC SQOOP lets you submit Sqoop commands from within your SAS application to your Hadoop cluster. PROC
The FREQ procedure in SAS supports computing exact p-values for many statistical tests. For small and mid-sized problems, the procedure runs very quickly. However, even though PROC FREQ uses efficient methods to avoid unnecessary computations, the computational time required by exact tests might be prohibitively expensive for certain tables. If
How can you grow a culture of innovation, scale your data, modernize your legacy BI strategy - and more? With "analytics in action," says Paul Bachteal, Senior Director of the Global Technology Practice at SAS. Bachteal recently presented to a standing room only crowd as part of the 2015 Texas A&M
As a longtime fan of the New York Mets and a longtime employee of SAS, I'm particularly excited about the start of the World Series. In 2014, the Mets and SAS formed a partnership to use SAS analytics to help the organization build stronger relationships with its fan base. While the vast majority of the credit
Last week I had the pleasure of attending (with six of my SAS colleagues) the IBF's Best Practices Forecasting Conference in Orlando. Some of the highlights: Charlie Chase and I were interviewed by Russell Goodman of SupplyChainBrain.com. The videos will be posted on SCB's website later this year. Meantime, enjoy
In my last post, I talked about why SAS utilizes a rotated Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) approach for topic generation, rather than using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). I noted that LDA has undergone a variety of improvements in the last seven years since SAS opted to use the SVD method. So, the
There's a sense of foreboding and uncertainty. You look around, but you're uncertain where to go next. What to do. Or who to turn to. Ultimately, it feels like an eerie calm before the storm. And you get that creepy feeling that something awful is just around the corner. I might be
When you work with big data, you often deal with both a large number of observations and a large number of features. When the number of features is large, they can be highly correlated, resulting in significant amount of redundancy in the data. Principal component analysis can be a very
SAS Grid Manager for Hadoop is a brand new product released with SAS 9.4M3 this summer. It gives you the ability to co-locate your SAS Grid jobs on your Hadoop data nodes to let you further leverage your investment in your Hadoop infrastructure. This is possible because SAS Grid Manager
Do you have fun being a computer geek, and programmatically creating holiday images? If so, then this blog's for you! In this example, I demonstrate how to take simple x/y coordinates, and create map polygons shaped like holiday images, that can be plotted using SAS/Graph's Proc GMap. Once you learn the
Did you know that the FREQ procedure in SAS can compute exact p-values for more than 20 statistical tests and statistics that are associated with contingency table? Mamma mia! That's a veritable smorgasbord of options! Some of the tests are specifically for one-way tables or 2 x 2 tables, but many apply
SAS experts, users and decision makers are taking over Las Vegas this week while attending Analytics 2015 and The Premier Business Leadership Series. Whether you are in Vegas or need to participate from afar, read on for help to stay in tuned and be a part of it all. Watch
The high cost of pricing myopia When launching a pharmaceutical product, it’s not enough to negotiate the best reimbursable price for each local market. Overall financial performance will depend on successfully managing go-to-market strategies at the global level. That means determining the optimal price and launch sequence for all the
Ok, so the title is a little provocative, but some people are dubious that data science training is even possible, because they believe data science entails skills one can learn only on the job and not in a classroom. I am not in that camp, although I do believe that data
When I was a kid, I always found it difficult to pick a Halloween costume. Now that I'm older, perhaps I can use computers & analytics to make my decision (and yours) easier! ... There are several different schools of thought on Halloween costumes - for example, some like to
“Field of dreams warehouse”– a historic phrase I used in the early days of data warehouse development. It describes the frenzy of activity that took place to create enterprise data infrastructure, before the business rationale for the data use was even understood. Those were the early days. In some ways
