In a noisy distribution environment, hotels are in significant danger of becoming commoditized. Differentiating themselves not only from the competition, but from the third party distributors, will be crucial to maintaining a competitive edge, or even just maintaining profitability. In an effort to connect better with guests, most hotel companies
Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory - hopefully you'll enjoy mine about the number of US E1 visas! I was perusing some of the US government charts, and found one on US immigration visas that caught my attention. It was a 3D bar chart, and since I always mistrust 3D
Thank goodness, winter is behind us! Hopefully it took all the germs with it. I hope you were able to dodge the cold and flu bullets this winter. If not, now’s the time to give your body, immune system and eating plan a refreshing kick start. Starting today, build these
There's "big," and then there is "factorial big." If you have k items, the number of permutations is "k factorial," which is written as k!. The factorial function gets big fast. For example, the value of k! for several values of k is shown in the following table. You can
Increasingly, automotive executives want to talk about the "Art of the Possible" in analytics. So we took the opportunity to invite leaders around the industry to an Automotive Analytics Executive Roundtable to share their stories and spark new ideas. A myriad of diverse speakers covered a variety of topics on big data/Hadoop, the
We had a lot of books at the ENAR 2015 Spring Meeting in Miami last week, but these were the top three bestsellers. Analysis of Observational Healthcare Data using SAS by Douglas E. Faries, Robert L. Obenchain, Josep Maria Haro, and Andrew C. Leon Survival Analysis Using SAS®: A Practical
The best graphs are both beautiful and informative - a smooth blend of art and analytics. But more often than not, the two collide rather than blending smoothly... Here is a link to a artistic infographic I recently saw posted by Vendavo on twitter. Their message (80% of your profit is generated
Parents, In a recent essay in the NY Times, Frank Bruni, op-ed columnist and author, exploded the myth that getting into a highly selective school is the key to success later in life. In line with my recent blog, “Parenting and the Sinking of the Essex”, I would like to
I've been in many bands over the years- from rock to jazz to orchestra - and each brings with it a different maturity, skill level, attitude, and challenge. Rock is arguably the easiest (and the most fun!) to play, as it involves the least members, lowest skill level, a goodly amount of drama, and the
Adoption of Hadoop, a low-cost open source platform used for processing and storing massive amounts of data, has exploded by almost 60 percent in the last two years alone according to Gartner. One primary use case for Hadoop is as a data lake – a vast store of raw, minimally processed data. But, in many ways, because
The title of this article makes no sense. How can the number of elements (in fact, the number of anything!) not be a whole number? In fact, it can't. However, the title refers to the fact that you might compute a quantity that ought to be an integer, but is
Sankey Diagrams have found increasing favor for visualization of data. This visualization tool has been around for a long time, traditionally used to visualize the flow of energy, or materials. . Now to be sure, GTL does have a statement design for a Sankey Diagram which was implemented only in Flex for use
I recently read a Washington Post article about the euro versus the dollar, and I wanted to analyze the data myself to see whether the article was simply stating the facts, or "sensationalizing" things. The washingtonpost.com article started with the headline, "This is historic: The dollar will soon be worth
Did you know the US-Malawi trade relationship is based almost entirely on tobacco? Or that apparel & accessories drive Morocco & Tunisia exports while their North African neighbors rely on oil? The United Nations Statistics Division collects detailed international trade data from more than 200 countries on the import and
Advances in technology, evolution of the distribution channels, demographic shift, economic conditions and regulations changes. How does an insurer prioritize all these seemingly competing goals and create sustainable competitive advantage. One answer is analytics. Many insurance companies are just beginning to take steps toward becoming an “analytic insurer” – one
It may never crossed your mind, but there are real-life cases when reversing graph axes make sense. For example, when Y-axis represents a depth under the sea level or depth of oil well drilling, it makes perfect sense to have zero on top and positive numbers increasing from top down.
Is daylight saving time the ultimate in efficiency, or is it living a lie? Here are some graphs that might help facilitate a discussion on this topic ... With daylight saving time (DST), a whole geo/political area (such as a country) decides to set their clocks forward an hour during
One thing that always puzzled me when starting out with data quality management was just how difficult it was to obtain management buy-in. I've spoken before on this blog of the times I've witnessed considerable financial losses attributed to poor quality met with a shrug of management shoulders in terms
“Dear Cat, I got an email from my IT department that says: [We are nearing capacity on the Flotsam Drive. Please clear data from any folders you are no longer using so we can save disk space. Thanks, The IT Department] Doesn’t this strike you as a bit old-fashioned? I
I know I’m not the only who feels it’s been an endless North Carolina winter! What could be more wonderful than the emerging spring with its warmer temperatures, bright sun, Carolina blue skies and longer days to spend time enjoying every minute of it! One of my favorite activities in
Imagine that you have one million rows of numerical data and you want to determine if a particular "target" value occurs. How might you find where the value occurs? For univariate data, this is an easy problem. In the SAS DATA step you can use a WHERE clause or a
When do analytics really provide value? All the time, of course. However, one of the best times for analytics to prove their value is when you are asked to do more with less. Often, the reason we are asked to do more with less is because of an economic downturn
Each year, SAS Global Forum conference organizers take your responses to surveys and pore over the suggestions and feedback you provide. Content and content delivery are bigger and better than ever at SAS Global Forum 2015 because of your feedback. Often, as good minds think alike, there will be trends
.@philsimon looks under the hood of 'analytics.'
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
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
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
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
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
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
