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
Contributed by Kim Truong, Sr. Marketing Manager, Hortonworks, where she is responsible for partner marketing with SAS. At Hortonworks, we’ve been working with SAS engineering teams since 2013, allowing our customers to leverage the inherent scale-out compute and storage capabilities of Hadoop in combination with the richness of SAS analytics.
Tax fraud…5-7 years in prison. I thought I had it all figured out. The government wades through millions of returns and tries to issue refunds quickly. Sure, I filed over a thousand for my clients, but that’s just a blip on their radar. I never thought I’d get caught. But
Judging by the spike in media coverage of tax fraud, one might think accountants have suddenly been inspired by Breaking Bad re-runs, and turned en masse to lives of crime. Umm… no. But, there are two good reasons for all the attention. One reason is because of a new law
Today is my 600th blog post for The DO Loop. I have written about many topics that are related to statistical programming, math, statistics, simulation, numerical analysis, matrix computations, and more. The right sidebar of my blog contains a tag cloud that links to many topics. What topics do you,
Back in late 2012 I discussed a technique for Conditional Highlighting, where additional attributes can be displayed in a graph. In the previous article the goal was to display a graph of Response by Year by Drug. We used a cluster grouped bar chart to create the bar chart. We
So, how did you first learn SAS programming? Originally, I was self-taught. Many years ago, I learned SAS on the job when a systems programmer quit and I took over supporting a mainframe performance software package that was written in SAS. I got a copy of the Base SAS users
In the 1988 film Beetlejuice, the title character, hilariously portrayed by Michael Keaton, is a bio exorcist (a ghost capable of scaring the living) hired by a recently deceased couple in an attempt to scare off the new owners of their house. Beetlejuice is summoned by saying his name three times. (Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice.) Nowadays
An Info Window is a SAS Visual Analytics pop-up window that provides additional information when a user selects a report object. When designing your report, you can think of an Info Window as simply an additional report section that is defined as hidden. Now that you know what an Info
Election fever has hit the United Kingdom as the days count down to 7th May 2015. This is likely to be one of the most uncertain elections in recent memory, with nearly 10 parties struggling for votes across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Results night will be tense, with the different
The Internet of Things (IoT) is going to take us into the next big technology wave, which will include a massive proliferation of personal connected devices like we have never seen before – cars, toothbrushes, household appliances, watches, medical devices, bicycles, and all sorts of things on our body and in
Whether it’s a smart water meter or a complex combustion turbine, expectations of reliability for complex, connected machines have increased across the board. Due to higher visibility and the availability of advanced analytics, companies know they should be able to identify emerging safety and reliability issues in these assets. By
As always at this time of year, I like to highlight some of the related analytical content at the upcoming conference, and those readers not going can expect to benefit from the windfall of papers and online videos that will follow SAS Global Forum 2015. This year, the lineup looks
As part of two of our client engagements, we have been tasked with providing guidance on an analytics environment platform strategy. More concretely, the goal is to assess the systems that currently compose the “data warehouse environment” and determine what the considerations are for determining the optimal platforms to support
I was recently asked by a customer if they should move the responsibility for creating the statistical baseline forecast. They were considering moving it from their regional country offices to their global headquarters. In addtion, they were considering changing the role of their regional demand planners to only make adjustments to
The adoption of data analytics in organisations is widespread these days. Due to the lower costs of ownership and increased ease of deployment, there are realistically no barriers for any organisation wishing to exploit more from their data. This of course presents a challenge because the rate of data analytics adoption
Editor's note (1/13/16): This post has been updated with full paper presentations from SAS Global Forum 2015. Enjoy! This year, the number of presentations, Super Demos and workshops to help with the administration of SAS software and its hardware infrastructure is growing at SAS Global Forum 2015. This is wonderful news to
