SAS 9.4 M3 released in July 2015 with some interesting new features and functionality for platform SAS administrators. In this blog I will review at a very high level the major new features. For details you can see the SAS 9.4 System Administration guide. SAS 9.4 M3 includes a new release
I recently read an argument by Andrew Wheeler for using a logarithmic axis for plotting odds ratios. I found his argument convincing. Accordingly, this blog post shows how to create an odds ratio plot in SAS where the ratio axis is displayed on a log scale. Thanks to Bob Derr
I saw the dress photo as blue & black. If you're a female, even if we perceived the exact same color, you might might not have said 'blue & black'. That's because women have a larger color vocabulary than men, and you might have elaborated on exactly which blue and
SAS recently held the Detroit Automotive Analytics Executive Forum to bring together leaders from the Industry. We heard from an experienced group of leaders on the future of the automotive industry, best practices for analytics success, innovative retail analytics, customer experience analytics, the connected vehicle, and competing on analytics. Following
We are all modelers. Whenever you plan, you are building a model. Whenever you imagine, you are building a model. When you create, write, paint or speak, you first build in your head a model of what you want to accomplish, and then fill in the details with words, movements
You’ve seen the notices on the SAS website or your company bulletin board. Perhaps you’ve gotten a meeting invitation via email or even heard a colleague talking about it. Still, you haven’t taken the plunge yet – you haven’t attended a SAS Users Group meeting, maybe because you’re uncertain about
This tip is from Heath Rushing, coauthor of Design and Analysis of Experiments by Douglas Montgomery: A Supplement for Using JMP®. After a recent design of experiments (DOE) course, a student asked about experiments with dependent factors. Throughout the two days of training, we spent considerable time designing experiments to
In a complicated, fast-paced and connected world, you don’t succeed alone. SAS and Cloudera have a successful partnership that dates back several years. Our products are complementary and provide significant quantifiable value to customers who run them on the same cluster. Add Intel to the mix and you have a trio
July has been an exciting month for me. Not only because of the historic Tour de France this year... but even more because this month the new offering SAS Factory Miner was officially released! With SAS Factory Miner you can run predictive models in an automated model tournament environment to
Base SAS contains many functions for processing strings, and you can call these functions from within a SAS/IML program. However, sometimes a SAS/IML programmer needs to process a vector of strings. No problem! You can call most Base SAS functions with a vector of parameters. I have previously written about
The Raleigh News & Observer published a front-page article about the effect of wealth and poverty on high school athletics in North Carolina. In particular, the article concluded that "high schools with a high percentage of poor students rarely win titles in the so-called country club sports—tennis, golf and swimming—and
In December, Saint Peter’s University grants Master’s degrees to its inaugural class of data scientists. 36 students are enrolled in this program, and eight are set to graduate. As reported this year by Bloomberg, career opportunities for analytics talent are excellent. Saint Peter’s is the latest to collaborate with SAS to offer such a program.
My colleague Robert Allison finds the most interesting data sets to visualize! Yesterday he posted a visualization of toothless seniors in the US. More precisely, he created graphs that show the estimated prevalence of adults (65 years or older) who have had all their natural teeth extracted. The dental profession
Good news...an analytics survey last year found that 72% of insurance executive agreed that analytics is the biggest game-changer in the next 2 years. Bad news...compared to other industries the adoption rates of analytics in the insurance has lagged other industries. To reverse this trend and help insurers travel down the
During a lighthearted moment in a serious conversation, Howard Schmidt, cyber security advisor to multiple presidents, told a Wall Street Journal interviewer that relying on a government agency as your primary backstop during a major cyber security breach is akin to calling Ghostbusters: you might not get the help you
When I was a kid, I remember a motivational poster on my dentist's wall that said "You don't have to brush all your teeth -- only the ones you want to keep." That poster really made me think, and brush my teeth! And now that I'm a data-analyst adult, I think
We’ve been talking about data recently at the Analytic Hospitality Executive. I’ve advocated to use whatever data you have, big or small, to get started today on analytic initiatives that will help you avoid big data paralysis. In this blog, I’m going to get a bit more technical than usual
What's that productivity related quote by Charles Dickens? "My advice is never do tomorrow what you can do today." For years, machine learning has been written about and discussed widely with a focus on the benefits it will bring in the near future. But guess what? The future for machine learning
The SAS Visual Analytics 7.2 release introduces a new look and feel to the Hub with the modern (HTML5) version. It also introduces a new feature, Shared Collections, which allows an administrator to push a Shared Collection to all users’ Hub view, including Guest access. And bonus - it will
One of the most important skills for data scientists and business analytical professionals is communications. If decision makers and managers don't understand what the numbers mean -- results won't turn into action. Jeff Zeanah, President of Z Solutions, Inc. has been presenting on the topic of speaking “analytics” for many
As a new mom, I’ve been trying to provide the healthiest foods possible for my family that don’t have added chemicals and unnecessary ingredients. According to the 2015 Nielson Survey, I’m not alone in this journey! Consumers are going back to the basics with about 4 in 10 global respondents
The triangular distribution has applications in risk analysis and reliability analysis. It is also a useful theoretical tool because of its simplicity. Its density function is piecewise linear. The standardized distribution is defined on [0,1] and has one parameter, 0 ≤ c ≤ 1, which determines the peak of the
Many of you know that I have lived for over a decade in an under-resourced neighborhood in Durham. I love my neighbors and my community. And I have learned the truth of Aboriginal activist Lilla Watson’s sage axiom, “If you have come to help me you are wasting your time; but
On July 14, 2015 SAS released SAS Factory Miner, our latest advanced data mining and machine learning product. This new product provides automated predictive modeling by segment in a high velocity grid enabled environment, allowing modelers to run hundreds of models within minutes and find champion models by segment quickly.
There's a lot of talk right now about the Internet of Things and how it's likely the prime catalyst for the digital transformation of organizations over the next few years. Billions of sensors, and devices with sensors, all generating data in a hyper-connected world where it can be easily shared
I'm gearing up to teach the next "DS2 Programming Essentials with Hadoop" class, and thinking about Warp Speed DATA Steps with DS2 where I first demonstrated parallel processing using threads in base SAS. But how about DATA step processing at maximum warp? For that, we'll need a massively parallel processing
I recently came across some very interesting data on serial killings ... but it was in tabular/text form. This seemed like an invitation for me to create some graphs that make it easier to understand the data. It seems many people have a morbid curiosity about serial killers. For example, some
A SAS programmer wanted to plot the normal distribution and highlight the area under curve that corresponds to the tails of the distribution. For example, the following plot shows the lower decile shaded in blue and the upper decile shaded in red. An easy way to do this in SAS
Customizing the output data set created using the OUTPUT statement When you request statistics on the PROC MEANS statement, the default printed output creates a nice table with the analysis variable names in the left-most column and the statistics forming the additional columns. Even if you create an output data
Operationalizing data governance means putting processes and tools in place for defining, enforcing and reporting on compliance with data quality and validation standards. There is a life cycle associated with a data policy, which is typically motivated by an externally mandated business policy or expectation, such as regulatory compliance.
