Have you ever wondered why sometimes a SGPLOT or GTL graph has markers drawn beyond the extreme tick and value on an axis and sometimes not? And, if you prefer your graphs to always have tick values on the axis that cover the whole range of data, how can you
Back in the 90s, there was a song by the C&C Music Factory about things that just didn't quite make sense - the song was called Things That Make You Go Hmm.... And in that same spirit, this blog post is about Graphs That Make You Go Hmm... I'm not
Data has value IF you can analyze it, said participants at a big data analytics roundtable at the Premier Business Leadership Series in Las Vegas. In attendance were executives from some of the largest Communications companies in the world including from the US, Canada, Turkey, Japan, Australia and the Philippines as well
For those of you who have followed my SAS Administration blogs, you will know that setting up your IO subsystem (the entire infrastructure from the network/fibre channels in your physical server, across your connections, to the fibre adapters into the storage array, and finally to the physical disk drives in
Meet Pam Cole, Senior Manager of the Recreation and Fitness Center and this week's contributor to the Inspirations blog. Pam has been at SAS Institute for over 20 years and has worked in fitness for over 25 years. An avid Tarheel fan, Pam graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a double major in
In my article about how to create a quantile plot, I chose not to discuss a theoretical issue that occasionally occurs. The issue is that for discrete data (which includes rounded values), it might be impossible to use quantile values to split the data into k groups where each group
In sports these days, there's a lot more data to keep track of than just the score! How can you make sense of it all? Being the Graph Guy, of course I recommend graphing it! Here's an example that's up close and personal for me - dragon boat racing... Below
The INFORMS 2014 Annual Meeting will be held In San Francisco from November 9-12; conference hotels are the Hilton San Francisco and the Parc 55 Wyndham. More than 35 SAS staff will participate, and SAS will have three adjacent booths representing SAS/OR (and all of Advanced Analytics), JMP, and the SAS
With big data, data governance challenges escalate in many ways: The diversity of data sources means that there are minimal standards for data structure, definition, semantics and content. The lack of control over data production means that you can’t enforce data quality at the source as you can do with
This post will violate the “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” rule, because last week I had the pleasure of attending and participating in the Analytics 2014 event there and want to share some of what I heard for those who couldn’t attend. I was joined by over 1,000
If you’re a SAS user, no matter what your role—programmer, analyst, statistician or administrator—data is important. But I’m willing to bet that somewhere in your organization, there’s a group of people who not only care about the data—it’s their passion, their raison d’être. Whether they sit in IT or your
It has been three months since the introduction of the SAS/IML File Exchange, so I thought I'd give a short update on recent submissions and activity. (Note: The File Exchange was merged into the SAS Community Library in 2022.) Users have submitted eight new articles. The application areas include experimental
One of the key benefits of using a horizontal bar chart is the ability to display statistics for each bar. This is a popular feature for the HBAR statement with the SAS/GRAPH GCHART procedure. So, let us review the options available to us to create such graphs using SGPLOT. The
Marketers are walking a tightrope today with data privacy issues: Data can simultaneously bring customers and brands together and further drive them apart. Recent data breaches, potential changes in data-privacy legislation and regulations loom large as customer expectations concerning marketing data continue to rise. As a result, today’s complex data
The other day I was doing some computations that caused me to wonder, "What is the smallest power of 2 that is greater than a given number?" The mathematics is straightforward. Given a number n, find the least value of k such that 2k ≥ n or, equivalently, k ≥
Just this morning I received a request for a brief survey from Apple on my feedback about the new iPhone6+. Yes, I finally got one, dead last in the family. The survey followed the usual format, with a number of questions on what I like or dislike about it, with
We all have goals…personal, professional, stretch goals, goals that will move us forward quickly. I’ve talked to many people who have a goal of someday writing a book. They always say “someday” in a wistful tone, because they never feel like they’ll have enough time or knowledge to be an
While previous SAS releases provided high availability through custom-designed failover techniques, many customers requested more robust failover or cluster support for high availability. The SAS 9.4 Metadata Server cluster was introduced to help address this need. A SAS Metadata Server cluster is a coordinated set of metadata servers that act
Many people enjoy solving word games such as the daily Cryptoquote puzzle, which uses a simple substitution cipher to disguise a witty or wise quote by a famous person. A common way to attack the puzzle is frequency analysis. In frequency analysis you identify letters and pairs of letters (bigrams)
At a recent MESA - Hollywood IT Society Digital Marketing conference, Claudio Ludovisi, SVP, Operational Strategy NBCU Entertainment for Marketing & Digital took a live poll of about 200 or so media marketing executives in the audience and asked them to “Think about what it takes to achieve true multiplatform
SAS software has long been used to help analyze 'risk' - what about using it to help determine your risk of being attacked by a vampire?!? On a previous Halloween, I was the victim of a Vampire attack. Here's the photographic proof... Being the most common O+ blood type, I
Finding people with the range of skills classified as data science can be a challenge, which is why some call them unicorns (do they really exist?), so I recently posted ten tips on finding unicorns. In my first post I elaborated on tips 1 and 2 (1. hire from an
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
