Finding the signal in the analytics noise
.@philsimon looks under the hood of 'analytics.'
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Tracking billionaires with beauty and accuracy
Which is more important - having beautiful graphs, or accurate graphs? Let's explore this question using the locations of the world's richest billionaires... I recently saw a beautiful map on dadaviz.com that purported to show the cities with the most billionaires. Here's a screen-capture of that map: I decided to
A 3D Scatter Plot Animation Macro
In the previous article, I described the process to create a 3D Scatter Plot using a 3D Orthographic View matrix and the SGPLOT procedure. I posted a macro that can be used to create a 3D scatter plot from any SAS data set, using 3 numeric columns, one each for
I can see clearly now thanks to this SAS student
With any software program, there are always new tips and tricks to learn, and nobody can know them all. Sometimes I even pick up tips or techniques from my students while they’re learning broader programming tips from me. Like fine wine, instructors only get better with age. Every customer interaction
How to pass parameters to a SAS program
This article show how to run a SAS program in batch mode and send parameters into the program by specifying the parameters when you run SAS from a command line interface. This technique has many uses, one of which is to split a long-running SAS computation into a series of
How to use the SAS pi constant
With Pi Day coming up on 3/14, I wanted to make sure all you SAS programmers know how to use the pi constant in your SAS code... All you have to do is use constant("pi") in a data step, and you've got the value of pi out to a good many decimal places
Descriptive statistics—the more, the merrier in SAS Visual Analytics
This blog is not about the original movie The More the Merrier (1943) or its remake, Walk, Don’t Run (1966), which I’ve actually seen a couple of times. It’s actually about the wide variety of descriptive statistics available in SAS Visual Analytics—and when you want to examine the characteristics of
So what should ‘the data’ have told England cricket coach Peter Moores?
England’s shambolic early exit from the Cricket World Cup has stirred up a hornet’s nest about the team’s supposed over-reliance on data. In the aftermath of their defeat to Bangladesh, coach Peter Moores said: ‘We thought 275 (runs) was chaseable. We’ll have to look at the data.’ It prompted outrage from
SAS Press is heading to ENAR 2015 Spring Meeting
Are you heading to the ENAR 2015 Spring Meeting in Miami this week? SAS author and Program Chair Mithat Gönen, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Associate Chair Brisa Sánchez, of the University of Michigan School of Public Health have created an outstanding scientific program this year. The sessions cover
Analyzing the first 10 million digits of pi: Randomness within structure
Saturday, March 14, 2015, is Pi Day, and this year is a super-special Pi Day! This is your once-in-a-lifetime chance to celebrate the first 10 digits of pi (π) by doing something special on 3/14/15 at 9:26:53. Apologies to my European friends, but Pi Day requires that you represent dates
Project Reviewer task and Copy Files task: refreshed for v7.1
Two popular SAS custom tasks have recently been updated for SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1. Most custom tasks that I've shared will work without modification across releases, but these two required a special rebuild due to some internal product API changes. The Project Reviewer task allows you to see a detail
Provisioning data for advanced analytics in Hadoop
The data lake is a great place to take a swim, but is the water clean? My colleague, Matthew Magne, compared big data to the Fire Swamp from The Princess Bride, and it can seem that foreboding. The questions we need to ask are: How was the data transformed and
It’s the Internet of connected life at Mobile World Congress
The Internet of Things is coming fast and furious. We clearly know what these “things” are, and were able to see prototypes at last week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) which hosted some 93,000 attendees. Things = connected life = cars, homes (thermostats, washer and dryers, vacuum cleaners, security systems, refrigerators, etc.),
New! "Demand-Driven Forecasting" course from SAS
My colleague Charlie Chase, Advisory Industry Consultant and author of the book Demand-Driven Forecasting, has developed a new course for the SAS Business Knowledge Series (BKS): Best Practices in Demand-Driven Forecasting. The 2-day course will be offered for the first time April 20-21 in Atlanta (and then again September 24-25 in Chicago). From the
How is innovation shaping the hospitality industry?
Innovation within hospitality drives awareness, service delivery, guest engagement, and brand differentiation. SAS asked a panel of experts to comment on how innovation is shaping the hospitality industry. According to many of our experts, analytics is at the heart of innovation. Learn more in this white paper on building
Where are your Girl Scout cookies made?
I just found out that Girl Scout cookies haven't changed from when I was a kid. I just moved to a different area, serviced by a different cookie maker! That's what I found out from the cool map in an article on latimes.com! The article explains that there are two different
How to solve puzzles? - Peg solitaire with optimization
Peg solitaire I love puzzles; I have a few of them in my office. I regularly use them at interviews: I ask the candidate either to solve a puzzle or to devise a (clever) mathematical algorithm that solves it. I'm sure a lot of readers are familiar with the standard
SAS FULLSTIMER—turn it on!
SAS FULLSTIMER is a SAS system option that takes operating system information that is being collected by SAS process runs and writes that information to the SAS log. Using it can add up to 10 lines additional lines to your SAS log for each SAS step in your SAS log—so why
3 Nutrition Tips to Boost Your Energy for Spring
Ole Man Winter has taken his sweet time getting out of here this year challenging even the most complacent weather watchers. But, last night I finally heard it - the beautiful trill of the Spring Peeper frogs. If you’re not from North Carolina or parts nearby, you may be unfamiliar
Matrix multiplication with missing values in SAS
Sometimes I get contacted by SAS/IML programmers who discover that the SAS/IML language does not provide built-in support for multiplication of matrices that have missing values. (SAS/IML does support elementwise operations with missing values.) I usually respond by asking what they are trying to accomplish, because mathematically matrix multiplication with
A 3D Scatter Plot Macro
The SG Procedures do not support creating a 3D scatter plot. GTL has some support for 3D graphs, including a 3D Bi-variate Histogram and a 3D Surface, but still no 3D point cloud. The lack of such a feature is not due to any difficulty in doing this as
Internet of Things: The industrial internet
Today in manufacturing there has been a lot of investment in automation, supervisory controls, quality, and execution systems. The amount of data produced and now being captured is staggering. The data captured in industry will re-define what is “big” in big data. Yet, for all this investment: Equipment still fails. Scrap
6 questions with social network analysis expert, Carlos Andre Reis Pinheiro
Beyond traditional clustering and predictive models lies social network analysis. It can help describe customers’ behaviors in new ways, but what exactly is it and how can businesses use it? To find out more, I interviewed Carlos Andre Reis Pinheiro. He’s been working in social network analysis around the world
Using Hadoop: Emerging options for improved query performance
In my last two posts, we concluded two things. First, because of the need for broadcasting data across the internal network to enable the complete execution of a JOIN query in Hadoop, there is a potential for performance degradation for JOINs on top of files distributed using HDFS. Second, there are
Relationship status - Connected; Analytics for Agency
“When it comes to the Internet of Things, the future clearly belongs to the Things”. I made this brash statement in a previous post (“Cloud encounters of the Fifth Kind”) referring to machine-to-machine (M2M) being the fastest growing component of non-human traffic on the Web. I say “brash” because that
Showing the ugly face of bad data: Part 2
In my previous post, I talked about how a bank realized that data quality was central to some very basic elements of its initiatives, such as know your customer (KYC), customer on-boarding and others. In this blog, let’s explore what this organization did to foster an environment of data quality
Writing data in chunks: Does the chunk size matter?
I often blog about the usefulness of vectorization in the SAS/IML language. A one-sentence summary of vectorization is "execute a small number of statements that each analyze a lot of data." In general, for matrix languages (SAS/IML, MATLAB, R, ...) vectorization is more efficient than the alternative, which is to
Better government data sharing reduces costs, improves services
For Parent’s Weekend this year, I needed to choose a restaurant for dinner in my son’s college town. Our extended family was attending the college football game and spending the weekend with our son. Before making my decision, I searched the internet for all the restaurants located within a reasonable
SAS analytics and forecasting news
♦We learned this week that SAS is ranked #4 on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2015. This makes six straight years ranking in the top four (including twice at #1). ♦The March/April 2015 issue of Analytics Magazine includes a SAS company profile by my colleague Kathy Lange. As
How do you measure up against an Olympic athlete?
You may be intrigued to know how the average person compares to a gold medal winning Olympic athlete when it comes to things like height, body mass, resting heart rate, arm span, body fat etc. Or, perhaps more frightening, how you measure up? I know this will resonate with my
