Have you ever noticed that some SAS/IML programmers use the CALL statement to call a subroutine, whereas others use the RUN statement? Have you ever wondered why the SAS/IML language has two statements that do the same thing? It turns out that the CALL statement and the RUN statement do
This week I had the opportunity to present a 1/2 day seminar on creating clinical graphs using the SG procedures during an In-House SAS Users' group meeting. I have presented this seminar quite a few times now, and I always learn something. The audience was very receptive, with some people
Business forecasting is a highly politicized process, subject to the biases and personal agendas of all forecasting process participants. This is why many -- perhaps most -- human adjustments to the forecast fail to make it better. And this is why relative metrics, such as FVA, are so helpful in
Big data is of no use unless you can turn it into information and insight. For that you need big analytics. Every piece of the analytics cycle has been impacted by big data, from reporting, with the need to quickly render reports from billions of rows of data, through advanced
Perhaps forecasting is a little of both, crystal ball and competitive edge. It’s a crystal ball of sorts because it helps leaders get answers to questions like, “How many? Or, “How much?” to decide what actions best help the business. And it’s definitely a competitive edge when it results in
Are you a legitimate hard-working company that has been threatened with a lawsuit, by a patent troll? If so, the graphs in this blog should make you happy! Speaking of 'happy' and 'troll' - here's a picture of a happy Troll Doll from my friend Hannah. Don't you just hate
Have you ever received an error or warning in SAS macro and did not know what to do next or even where to look? Now there is an answer! And debugging your SAS macros just got easier. All macro errors and warnings are now documented in the SAS 9.4 Macro
For most people, this time of year means celebrating cherished, personal traditions… helping those less fortunate…flocking to stores in droves…the company holiday party… For the SAS Security Intelligence team, it means identity theft…benefits fraud…unemployment insurance fraud...insider threats. Why? Because next week is International Fraud Awareness Week! And we’re celebrating by
As the team of nearly 50 peer-reviewers finalize their review and recommendations, I want to reflect on the amazing accomplishments of the SAS Global Forum 2015 teams: Nearly 700 sessions were submitted by the SAS user community and SAS experts! More than 150 selections are online and available for preview!
When we think of acne, we typically think of teenagers and raging hormones. However, there has been an upsurge of adult acne over the last 50 years. Why, you ask? Well, one probable cause is changes to our food supply and dietary habits. Nutritional voids and dietary excess can have
There are times when I harken back to the classic television show M.A.S.H. For those of you too young to remember, the story centered around a mobile Army surgical hospital in the midst of the conflict in the Korean peninsula. While they weren't the first people to see the patient, the unit
Did you know that applying a new SAS license file for many SAS solutions is a two step process? Because many of SAS’ most of popular solutions (including SAS® Visual Analytics, SAS® Enterprise MinerTM and SAS® Customer Intelligence) depend on the middle-tier architecture for primary user access, information about licensed
When I studied high school geometry, I noticed that many homework problems involved right triangles whose side lengths were integers. The canonical example is the 3-4-5 right triangle, which has legs of length 3 and 4 and a hypotenuse of length 5. The triple (3, 4, 5) is called a
In his Spring 2014 article in Foresight, Paul Goodwin addressed the important issue of point vs. probabilistic forecasts. A point forecast is a single number (e.g., the forecast for item XYZ in December is 635 units). We are all familiar with point forecasts, as these are what's commonly produced (either
The Advanced Analytics division of SAS Research & Development has announced three Summer Fellowships in the areas of Forecasting and Econometrics. The SAS forecasting fellowships are open to doctoral candidates in mathematics, statistics, computer science, and related graduate departments in the United States. They offer the opportunity to work closely
Do you have an Uncle Louie? Yep - we all do! You know what I mean - this guy: When my wife and I were planning to get married, we had all sorts of big decisions to make. Where would our future home be? How many kids would we have?
I was recently asked about how to use the SAS/IML language to efficiently add a constant to every element of a matrix diagonal. Mathematically, the task is to form the matrix sum A + kI, where A is an n x n matrix, k is a scalar value, and I is the
By infusing analytics through every phase of the guest journey, hotel managers can help shore up the complicated balance between the guest experience and revenue and profit responsibilities – delivering memorable and personalized guest experiences, while maximizing revenue and profits. To accomplish this, hotels need to be able to collect,
It's time for a fall fraud roundup. Bad deeds swirl around like so many dry leaves, and I'd like to highlight a few of them this week. It can happen anywhere, even in sports, and no, I'm not picking on those shoplifting Dallas Cowboys here. An MLS referee was suspended for workers' compensation
If someone asks you whether SAS runs in the cloud, there are exactly two wrong answers: "yes" and "no". Instead, this question should spark a discussion. It should be a discussion about which of the five characteristics of cloud computing they are interested in. The answers will point you in
My colleague Robert Allison has a knack for finding fascinating data. Last week he did it again by locating data about how blood types and Rh factors vary among countries. He produced a series of eight world maps, each showing the prevalence of a blood type (A+, A-, B+, B-,
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
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
