In The Princess Bride, one of my favorite movies, our hero Westley – in an attempt to save his love, Buttercup – has to navigate the Fire Swamp. There, Westley and Buttercup encounter fire spouts, quicksand and the dreaded rodents of unusual size (RUS's). Each time he has a response to the
Somebody once said that relationships are not easy. Well now they are—in SAS 9.4, at least! SAS objects have inherent relationships and dependencies, and a change to one element can often have an impact on one or many related objects. For example, for SAS Visual Analytics reports to work as
As a personal trainer, one of the top comments I hear from clients is that they want to “tone up.” Some even go as far to tell me which area of their body needs said toning. What they’re really saying is that they want more muscle and for that
Evaluating a cumulative distribution function (CDF) can be an expensive operation. Each time you evaluate the CDF for a continuous probability distribution, the software has to perform a numerical integration. (Recall that the CDF at a point x is the integral under the probability density function (PDF) where x is
Warranties have a long - and some might say - interesting past. But the future is even brighter. New technologies and data sources are transforming our understanding of field quality, enabling deeper insights into product performance and customer preferences. These breakthroughs are accelerating the quest to reduce defects and satisfy customers.
Many of us have schedules packed so tight we don’t have room to eat a meal sitting down much less read a novel or go for a long walk. With work, family, friends and other commitments, our days, weeks and months speed by us. It is easy to get caught
In my last post, I pointed out that an uninformed approach to running queries on top of data stored in Hadoop HDFS may lead to unexpected performance degradation for reporting and analysis. The key issue had to do with JOINs in which all the records in one data set needed
Financial institutions are mired with large pools of historic data across multiple line of businesses and systems. However, much of the recent data is being produced externally and is isolated from the decision making and operational banking processes. The limitations of existing banking systems combined with inward-looking and confined data practices
This year I am expecting SAS Global Forum to be one of the biggest and best ever! The SAS Global Users Group makes changes and enhancements each year at SAS Global Forum based on the feedback we receive from SAS users. And I am pleased to be the first to
Small data is akin to algebra; big data is like calculus.
Last week I received a message from SAS Technical Support saying that a customer's IML program was running slowly. Could I look at it to see whether it could be improved? What I discovered is a good reminder about the importance of vectorizing user-defined modules. The program in this blog
From the pressures of a highly competitive marketplace to changing economic conditions, to the evolution of the distribution network - the challenges facing the hospitality are many and varied. In this video, SAS asked a panel of experts to share their views on the issues that will challenge the hospitality
Does your week start on Sunday or Monday? Do you have a promotional product you would like to see at the top of your list? Do you have a particular order in which you like to view your regions? Custom sorting is now possible with SAS Visual Analytics 7.1. The
I recently wrote about how to overlay multiple curves on a single graph by reshaping wide data (with many variables) into long data (with a grouping variable). The implementation used PROC TRANSPOSE, which is a procedure in Base SAS. When you program in the SAS/IML language, you might encounter data
My Performance Validation team in SAS R&D is constantly working with our partners to test how their storage arrays work with SAS. In late 2014, we finalized several papers that discuss how a mixed analytics workload performs on several storage arrays. While doing this testing, we also listed lessons-learned in
In the movie Big, a 12-year-old boy, after being embarrassed in front of an older girl he was trying to impress by being told he was too short for a carnival ride, puts a coin into an antique arcade fortune teller machine called Zoltar Speaks, makes a wish to be big,
For years, saturated fat has been blamed for high cholesterol levels and heart attacks. This overemphasis on reducing fat intake led many people to start substituting high carbohydrate, high sugar, processed foods for fats - bye, bye eggs, hello fat-free cookies!
Data. To a statistician, data are the observed values. To a SAS programmer, analyzing data requires knowledge of the values and how the data are arranged in a data set. Sometimes the data are in a "wide form" in which there are many variables. However, to perform a certain analysis
Despite an increase in the availability of data in the federal government over the past few years, data and analytics could be doing even more for federal agencies. A strategic approach to managing and analyzing the data is needed. And, like many technology challenges – that’s a people problem. A
I’m not a seasoned business traveler so I generally plan to arrive extra early and leave a little late to avoid any last-minute stress. The problem with all that stress-avoidance is that I often have extra time on my hands and am stuck with finding ways to entertain myself. What
"You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error." ~ Tim Harford TED Talk link: http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford Karl Marx died thinking that the first communist revolution would occur in Great Britain, driven by the long hours and unsafe
Sports provide us with many familiar clichés about playing defense, such as: Defense wins championships. The best defense is a good offense. Or my favorite: The best defense is the one that ranks first statistically in overall defensive performance, after controlling for the quality of the offenses it has faced. Perhaps not
After the legalization of recreational marijuana use in Colorado in 2012, it has been a much more frequent news topic than before - even from a data analysis perspective... I was recently looking for 'interesting' data to analyze with SAS, and I noticed some articles about the increasing potency of marijuana in
SAS procedures usually handle missing values automatically. Univariate procedures such as PROC MEANS automatically delete missing values when computing basic descriptive statistics. Many multivariate procedures such as PROC REG delete an entire observation if any variable in the analysis has a missing value. This is called listwise deletion or using
Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1979, after an extensive vaccination campaign in the 19th and 20th centuries. This blog post contains a visual analysis of the final years of this disease in the US ... In my previous blog post, I imitated and improved infectious disease graphs from a recent Wall
Many states are starting to crack down on the serious abuses of government programs, cutting down on outright fraud as well as reducing abuses and errors. I wanted to highlight one of those, now that they've been on this path for a few years. North Carolina, where SAS is headquartered,
As the point person for SAS joining the new Open Data Platform (ODP) initiative, I want to make it clear why SAS is involved with ODP, and why we think it’s important to our customers, and the Hadoop and big data ecosystem as a whole. SAS is not in it to
Hadoop is increasingly being adopted as the go-to platform for large-scale data analytics. However, it is still not necessarily clear that Hadoop is always the optimal choice for traditional data warehousing for reporting and analysis, especially in its “out of the box” configuration. That is because Hadoop itself is not
The Institute of Business Forecasting's FVA blog series continued in January, with my interview of Shaun Snapp, founder and editor of SCM Focus. Some of Shaun's answers surprised me, for example, that he doesn't compare performance to a naïve model (which I see as the most fundamental FVA comparison). But he went
How many of us have heard or even said the phrase, "If it's not broke, don't fix it." While on rare occasions this may be the correct approach, it is a statement that stops innovation and creativity in its tracks. You might as well say, "Because we've always done it that
