At a recent TDWI conference, I was strolling the exhibition floor when I noticed an interesting phenomenon. A surprising percentage of the exhibiting vendors fell into one of two product categories. One group was selling cloud-based or hosted data warehousing and/or analytics services. The other group was selling data integration products. Of
If you are a Caregiver, there is likely going to be a point at which you feel you aren't doing enough, you aren't doing it well, or a combination of the two. So it's not really a question of "Do you feel Caregiver Guilt?" but "When do you feel Caregiver
Streaming analytics is a red hot topic in many industries. As the Internet of Things continues to grow, the ability to process and analyze data from new sources like sensors, mobile phones, and web clickstreams will set you apart from your competition. Event stream processing is a popular way to
In my SAS Press book Business Statistics Made Easy in SAS® I place a strong focus on the skill of extrapolating analytics/statistical outcomes to key business implications (similar techniques can be used to link statistics to other key societal outcomes). Unfortunately, business analytics often stops short of defining the impact
Math lovers, do you know what day it is? It's Pi Day, which we celebrate every year on March 14 because the date 3-14 matches the first three digits of pi, 3.14. This year, I'm celebrating with poetry, combining my love of math with my love of language. Word Spy explains that a pi-ku is
People have always been fascinated by sports statistics, and with the recent popularity of fantasy sports there is an increased demand for custom analyses of the sports data. With those folks in mind, I have created a simple example that SAS programmers can use as a starting point for analyzing NBA
In the past, we've always protected our data to create an integrated environment for reporting and analytics. And we tried to protect people from themselves when using and accessing data, which sometimes could have been considered a bottleneck in the process. We instituted guidelines and procedures around: Certification of the data
I was answering questions about SAS in a forum the other day, and it struck me how much easier it is to help folks if they can provide a snippet of data to go along with their program when asking others to help troubleshoot. This makes it easy to run
Being able to access information about your operating system from within SAS can be incredibly useful. For example, if you have a directory that contains an unknown number of CSV files that you would like to read into SAS, you certainly would not want to have to write an IMPORT
How many of us have used the phrases… It’s a piece of cake Anyone can do it It’s as easy as ABC I could do it with my eyes shut When it comes to business intelligence it should be “easy peasy” but for many organization it can still be a
The importance of data analytics in the UK public sector and wider society was in the spotlight earlier this year, following a report from Policy Exchange. It called for elected mayors to set up an Office of Data Analytics. If enacted, these teams of experts will have one central aim:
When you spend long enough writing and working in any industry, you inevitably see trends emerge and reach varying levels of maturity. Data governance is one such trend, as you can see from the following Google Trends chart:
Do you like a good horror story? Then may I suggest “Future Crimes” by Marc Goodman. When it comes to this genre, Wes Craven, John Carpenter and Stephen King have got nothing on Goodman, primarily because Goodman’s story is non-fiction. Scene 1: The present – Your workstation or data center Whether
For many of us at some point in our adult lives we will be cooking for just ourselves. For some of us, this means take-out, fast food, or cereal for dinner. But don’t let the convenience of take out and fast food derail your health! Eating real, whole foods, is
You can use histograms to visualize the distribution of data. A comparative histogram enables you to compare two or more distributions, which usually represent subpopulations in the data. Common subpopulations include males versus females or a control group versus an experimental group. There are two common ways to construct a
Our colleagues at the SAS office in Korea recently had the opportunity to interview two customers from KT, one of the biggest telecommunications companies in Korea, about getting SAS certified. Sung-chul Hwang and Gyu-seob Lee both have four SAS certifications – Base Programmer, Advanced Programmer, Statistical Business Analyst and Predictive
In this post, I continue the journey of getting data profiling results into SAS Visual Analytics. In my first blog I described the process of collecting DataFlux Data Quality profiling metrics to load a datamart. Now we load this datamart into memory (LASR) and then plug a VA report on
We recently had a flooding event at Jordan Lake where the water rose almost 20 feet above normal. This blog details that flooding event in both photos and graphs. If you're intrigued by weather, boats, or lakes then this blog's for you! In NC's Research Triangle Park area, there are basically two
.@philsimon lists the gravest data-quality errors.
Most SAS regression procedures support the "stars and bars" operators, which enable you to create models that include main effects and all higher-order interaction effects. You can also easily create models that include all n-way interactions up to a specified value of n. However, it can be a challenge to
Let us continue with our journey beyond standard plots and charts. Often we need to create some simple diagrams to visualize the connections between different entities such as patients and providers or even a social network. Many of you may not have a custom tool to create diagrams. But you have Base SAS, so
In my previous post, Introducing data-driven loops, I suggested a way of implementing programming loops with a list of index variables pulled from an external data table. These ordinary programming loops iterate during code execution while processing some data elements of an input data table. SAS macro loops, on the
In previous articles, I've shared tips about how you can work with SAS and ZIP files without requiring an external tool like WinZip, gzip, or 7-Zip. I've covered: How to create ZIP files with ODS PACKAGE ZIP (available since SAS 9.2) How to "unzip" and read ZIP files using FILENAME
On a recent CBS Sunday Morning episode Dr. Phil McGraw of “Dr. Phil” fame was featured. During the segment he talked about shifting his focus from golf to tennis. To paraphrase, he said golf drove him crazy because he couldn’t bear down, run faster, sweat harder and be better. I
In my previous blog post I talked about how the rapid and varied growth of data calls for states to consider an enterprise analytics program, in the form of a Center of Analytics. This entry, first posted as an article on Government Executive's Route Fifty, gives the most important success
This is my second article about voice of customer analysis; you can find the first here. The first time we discussed that a simple sentiment polarity score was a rather a narrow view. This time we will examine a more insightful approach, using voice of customer analysis to monitor customers’ opinions
Here's a golf puzzle from Sam Loyd: Everybody is playing golf now, and even the lazy ones who a few weeks ago declared how much pleasanter it was to swing in a shady hammock, have caught the golf fever and are chasing the ball around the golf links. I am
I took my first Uber ride recently. I was with a colleague and we were going into the office before dawn to finish a presentation we were making later that morning. As our Uber driver accelerated to merge onto the interstate, we heard a high-pitched whine and smelled hot metal
I've been doing some investigation into Apache Spark, and I'm particularly intrigued by the concept of the resilient distributed dataset, or RDD. According to the Apache Spark website, an RDD is “a fault-tolerant collection of elements that can be operated on in parallel.” Two aspects of the RDD are particularly
There’s been quite a lot of chatter lately about my Boston Red Sox and their recent shift ‘away’ from using analytics or ‘sabermetrics,’ as data science is often referred to in baseball (Jeff Passan, one of my favorite baseball writers, chimes in here – Forbes also commented that the Sox are
