Greetings, insignificant souls. You may call me … Gregor Castamere. It is not my true name. I stalked this strip of land when it was called New Amsterdam. My family’s name is well known. I have lived for more than 600 years, concealing my terrible secret. I am a vampire.
Perhaps it is my astrological sign, but as a Gemini, I seem to be cursed blessed with a duality that consists of balancing my creative side with exacting nature of my logical side. In my personal life, I enjoy woodworking. Whether it is creating “art in the round” from a
The Global Hadoop market was valued at $1.5 billion in 2012 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 58.2 percent, to reach $50.2 billion by 2020, according to a Hadoop Market Analysis report prepared by Allied Market Research. There is no doubt that IT teams are
One of my presentations at SAS Global Forum 2014 was about the new heat map functions in SAS/IML 13.1. Over the summer I created a short video of my presentation, which gives an overview of visualizing matrices with heat maps, and describes how to choose colors for heat maps: If
This week I’m going to “fill in” for Natalie to complete our series on “What can Hotels learn from Casinos”? (Look for parts 1 and 2 here and here, respectively) Today I’m going to address pricing. We all know that great entertainment comes at a price, and we also know
Perhaps the greatest legacy that Ford Motor Company’s former chief executive, Alan Mulally, left behind is a culture of analytics. Ford began using analytics in the late 1990’s, but it wasn’t until their financial woes in the 2000’s and Mulally’s arrival in 2006, that analytics started to be used regularly for
The weighted average calculation is a useful metric that you should be familiar with. The more common calculation of average is the arithmetic mean, which assumes that each data point has an equal weight. Unlike the arithmetic mean, the weighted average takes into account the fact that some data points
In a previous blog post, I showed how to layer colored areas on a SAS map to show both countries, and the areas within countries that had cases of Ebola. But as the Ebola epidemic has spread, more data has become available, and in this blog I show how to
Last week, I was fortunate enough to attend the Insurance Networking News Analytics Symposium. This great event had several engaging speakers. As analytics becomes more prevalent within insurance, it was refreshing to see that many organizations discuss their successes and share best practices in this essential aspect of the business.
Who do you want to be when you grow up? And can I offer you a suggestion? Considering the huge shortfall in analytical talent we’re facing, we should be asking those two questions more often. Many of the people who are considering a change in careers or searching for their
Did you know: For 13 percent of car buyers a new vehicle without internet access is a no-go? Obviously, no-go means no-buy. Thirteen percent! If I have ever seen a market demand, it is this. For sure, the industry will respond to that. The management consulting company Bain even expects
Heat maps are a great way to visualize the bi-variate distribution of data. Traditionally, a heat may may have two numeric variables, placed along the X and Y dimension. Each variable range is sub divided into equal size bins to create a rectangular grid of bins. The number of observations
In 2015 Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting will celebrate 10 years of publication. From high in his aerie in the Colorado Rockies, here is Editor-in-Chief Len Tashman's preview of the current issue: In this 35th issue of Foresight, we revisit a topic that always generates lively and entertaining
If you’ve used SAS Environment Manager, you know what kind of information it’s capable of providing – the metrics that show you how the resources in your SAS environment are performing. But what if it could do more? What if it could automatically collect and standardize metric data from SAS
We seem to hear about new diets almost on a weekly basis. Many of these diets will come and go, but here are some that have been around for a very long time. There are also heated debates around what diet is the best: Vegetarian, Vegan, Paleo, Low Carb, High
What is kurtosis? What does negative or positive kurtosis mean, and why should you care? How do you compute kurtosis in SAS software? It is not clear from the definition of kurtosis what (if anything) kurtosis tells us about the shape of a distribution, or why kurtosis is relevant to
Companies like Amazon, Netflix, Zappos and Pandora have changed what consumers expect from a brand – they want brands to “know” what they want before they ask for it. To provide those kinds of personalized products and services, brands have to collect and analyze huge quantities of customer and industry
Have you noticed lower gasoline prices lately? How low will they go, and how long will they stay down? Let's use SAS to analyze some of the data!... First, let's look at just the price of gasoline over time. Here's a plot of the US average gasoline price, each week
In a city built on hedging your bets, it is fitting that the Analytics 2014 conference kicked off Monday in Las Vegas with a look at all the unscientific ways people try to predict the future. John Elder, Founder and President of Elder Research, Inc., entertained the audience with examples of how
Attending an industry conference requires an investment in time away from the office and maximizing that investment makes a lot of sense. In addition to gaining insight into challenges facing the analytics industry today, discovering and evaluating new products and services, and networking with the largest gathering of analytics professionals
Europol, the law enforcement agency of the European Union, in its recently released 2014 Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (iOCTA), cited a report by U.S. security firm IID that predicts that the first “online murder” will occur by year end, based on the number of computer security system flaws discovered
Welcome to the blog “Operations Research with SAS: Optimize, Simulate, Understand.” For those of you without an operations research background, a brief explanation: operations research (OR) is the study of the operations of systems, with a focus on making them function more efficiently and more effectively. The overall goal of
It's my favorite time of year! The leaves are changing. Football is back. And it's also time for our annual Analytics conference. One of the best parts about my job is getting to attend the conference each year and host the Inside Analytics video series. Not everyone at the conference gets
The Chicago weather cooperated for MWSUG 2014 with nice crisp fall temperatures, clear skies and beautiful sunrises over the lake. Aside from the weather, here are my five favorite memories of MWSUG 2014: 1. Location-location-location. The location and venue were fabulous! Not only were we along the Chicago River with a beautiful
A few years ago I wrote an article that shows how to compute the log-determinant of a covariance matrix in SAS. This computation is often required to evaluate a log-likelihood function. My algorithm used the ROOT function in SAS/IML to compute a Cholesky decomposition of the covariance matrix. The Cholesky
Getting consistent group colors across different data sets for a graph is a common topic of interest. Recently a user wrote in to ask how to ensure that specific groups "values" for a bar chart get specific colors. The group values may arrive in different order, or some may
As this article on the mythical data scientist describes, many people call this special kind of analytical talent "unicorns," because the breed can be so hard to find. In order to close the analytical talent gap that McKinsey Global Institute and others have predicted, and many of you experience today, SAS launched
Beginning with the first maintenance of SAS 9.4, you have the ability to define your own symbol markers using the SYMBOLCHAR and SYMBOLIMAGE statements. With these statements you can select a Unicode value or you can select an image file that exists on the local file system—making the possibilities for
How many times a day do you search (or “Google”) how to do something with a product, the best ways to perform “X,” or for help with a problem? Chances are it’s a lot, and when you do, you likely land on a forum where your peers have posted answers
My previous blog post describes how to implement Conway's Game of Life by using the dynamically linked graphics in SAS/IML Studio. But the Game of Life is not the only kind of cellular automata. This article describes a system of cellular automata that is known as Wolfram's Rule 30. In
