The SAS Training and Certification groups are excited to participate in SAS Global Forum 2015! We’ll have a booth in the Quad where you can stop by to ask questions, talk to your favorite instructor and register to win an iPad! We offer courses on almost every SAS product so to
Profitable growth is at the forefront of manufacturing executives’ minds¹. The math is simple: increase revenue and decrease costs. Easy, right? Unfortunately, getting there isn't that simple. The good news is that analytics can help. The better news is that there’s a new place for manufacturers to discover analytic best
Sometimes you just need a new pair of shoes or a brand new hat. Something so small can add a pep to your step and allow you to see new opportunities in the same old places. Don't believe me? Try it. We did and I can't wait for you to
What data do you prepare to analysis? Where does that data come from in the enterprise? Hopefully, by answering these questions, we can understand what is required to supply data for an analytics process. Data preparation is the act of cleansing (or not) the data required to meet the business
Smoking is an addictive habit that can kill you - if you don't believe me, check out the infographic in this blog post. Recently a friend of mine was on the episode of the Dr. Phil show that focused on "quitting smoking." Here's a picture of Traci with Dr. Phil
SAS System software supports a wide variety architecture and deployment possibilities. It’s wild when you think about it because you can scale the analytic power of SAS from the humblest single CPU laptop machine all the way up to hundreds-of-machines clusters. When SAS deployments involve many machines, it’s natural to
.@philsimon on what we can learn from Seattle's juggernaut.
Vinegar has been around for thousands of years, and it’s been used medicinally for likely just as long. We've all heard the “wives tales” about what vinegar can do (and seen the crazy claims on the internet). But does it really work? Vinegar has been researched for a while now,
Happy Earth Day, earthlings! As an outsider observing your planet, with absolutely no nefarious intentions whatsoever, I have to say you have a pretty good thing going there. I was sent by the leading…scientists on my planet, Kahnquur-7, to learn more about Earth, its dominant life form (yay, humans!), its
A customer asked: How do we go about summing a finite series in SAS? For example, I want to compute for various integers n ≥ 3. I want to output two columns, one for the natural numbers and one for the summation of the series. Summations arise often in statistical
“There’s no such thing as information overload - there is only filter failure”. ~ Internet scholar Clay Shirky Information overload is not just a recent phenomenon, it entered into human experience in the middle of the 15th century with Gutenberg and his printing press, and we’ve been devising ways to cope
If anyone knows how to finesse insight out of data, it’s Bart Baesens, professor at KU Leuven (Belgium), and a lecturer at the University of Southampton (United Kingdom). Not only has he written a book about it, Analytics in a Big Data World: The Essential Guide to Data Science and
In clinical trials, a waterfall plot is often used to indicate how patients in the study responded to treatment. In oncology trials, the response variable might be the percent change in the size of a tumor from the individual's baseline value at the start of the trial. The percent change
MicroMaps are a powerful way to display data where the display includes small, lightweight maps to provide geographical information regarding the data. This geographical information gives clues to the relationship between the data that could lead to more insight. The SAS SG Procedures and GTL do not currently have built-in
Analytics as it pertains to the employees and the workforce is taking the industry by storm. Recently, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about how companies are harnessing the power of analytics to help them identify staff who are likely to leave. In the past few weeks
In a previous post, I discussed how hospitality marketers can gain a complete picture of their guests and understand guest behavior with analytics. In this post, I will explore what you can do once you have a complete picture of your guests. Today’s operating environment presents a set of challenges
Data about the monthly wait times at VA facilities in the US are now available, but it's a bit overwhelming to try to analyze them in tabular form - plotting the data on a map made it a lot easier!... Here in the US, when our soldiers finish their commitment in
There is no doubt that analytics is an overused and often abused term. So what does really analytics means? In part 2 of a series of articles on the analytical lifecycle, this blog will highlight some of the common and emerging techniques used to analyze data and build predictive models
Oil is bouncing around the $50 range as the market adds and loses value with each new headline, from potential new Iranian exports after the nuclear talks to the slowest month of inventory builds at Cushing since Thanksgiving. The US rigcount is down nearly 23 percent year-over-year, but the rate
I watched with wonder as each of my daughters learned how to "tell time." Early in their primary school careers, they brought home worksheets that featured clock faces with big-hand/little-hand configurations that they had to decipher, and exercises that asked them to draw the hands as they should appear given
Many experienced and novice SAS programmers take advantage of the power of a “language within a language” offered by PROC SQL, SAS/IML and the SAS Macro Facility. But how many of you are aware of recently added languages and techniques? These newer tools are designed to help SAS programmers leverage
Has this year's flu been better or worse than you thought it would be? There are a lot of factors that help determine whether or not you're likely to get the flu. Is there a bad strain going around? Did the flu vaccine target the right strain? Did you get
If you are one of the thousands of SAS users soon to be in Dallas for SAS Global Forum, you've probably already used the online tools to help you view sessions related to your industry. It’s easy to do by filtering on your own particular industry, such as banking, or
In the last few days, I have heard the term “data lake” bandied about in various client conversations. As with all buzz-term simplifications, the concept of a “data lake” seems appealing, particularly when it is implied to mean “a framework enabling general data accessibility for enterprise information assets.” And of
Unplugging for a week: Crazy or possible?! How many of you have had that day, weekend or week when you ask yourself “what else can the kids do?” Not only for their sanity but for yours too! We all want the same things for our kids: to stay as active as
Last week I was chatting with some mathematicians and I mentioned the blog post that I wrote last year on the distribution of Pythagorean triples. In my previous article, I showed that there is an algorithm that uses matrix multiplication to generate every primitive Pythagorean triple by starting with the
I press a button, a miracle machine churns through all the calculations in the world and the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything[1] is produced as a single number. Oh hang on, that’s 42. Alright, for our microcosm, let’s stick to the answer to my
After working as a flight attendant for more than 20 years, Lauren Guevara was ready for a new adventure. The inspiration for her journey came from an article she read in CNN’s Money magazine that highlighted the earning potential of a SAS Certification. Also having earned a Master of Science
This is a follow up to last week’s blog on understanding your customers’ perceptions of quality. As the world’s largest manufacturer of PCs and tablets, Lenovo is always looking for areas to reduce costs while increasing quality and customer satisfaction. Six months ago, Lenovo implemented the Lenovo Early Detection (LED) system
How simple is too simple, when it comes to analyzing data on a map? The KISS principle can be applied to many things, including graphs and maps. What is the KISS principle, you might ask? Well, it's not the rock band that my friend Patricia (pictured below) has been known
