Today, I'd like to introduce Celeste Cooper-Peel, the RFC's Wellness Supervisor. Celeste has been in the health and wellness field for twenty years. After receiving her Masters in Health Education from East Carolina University, she ventured into the mind/body world receiving training in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Yoga. Shortly after,
Many people know that the SAS/IML language enables you to read data from and write results to multiple SAS data sets. When you open a new data set, it is a good programming practice to close the previous data set. But did you know that you can have two data
Data-driven marketing is all about how marketers can harness data and analytics to create a more customer-centric, fact-based approach to customer engagement. This, combined with quality execution leads to better customer experiences and improved customer equity. However when looking at customer-brand interactions in silos such as in the call centre
Imagine this situation: You go to you doctor and tell her that "something hurts in the lower chest area." Now, based on this short description of your pain, you expect her to come up with a precise diagnosis and a specific therapy suggestion, including treatment time and associated cost. Sound
It’s my favorite time of the year, draft time! NFL and Fantasy Football fans, I don’t mean THAT draft, but similar. It’s what I will call the #SASGF15 draft! The time of year when the best and the brightest, the most knowledgeable, passionate, and inspirational SAS users submit ideas around
I received the following email from a SAS/IML programmer: I am getting an error in a PROC IML module that I wrote. The SAS Log says NOTE: Paused in module NAME When I submit other commands, PROC IML doesn't seem to understand them. How can I continue the program? The
The Third PharmaSUG-China conference was held in Beijing last week, and I had the pleasure to attend this excellent conference along with a record number of attendees. On Thursday, I presented two 1/2 day seminars on ODS Graphics. One titled "Advanced Topics in GTL" and another titled "Complex Clinical Graphs
➤ DISCLOSURE! In June 2018 Google introduced changes to the way it handles its Maps platform. They now require API key in order to embed a map, plus Google Maps "projects" must now be associated with a billing account. Unless these new Google rules are met, Google maps described in
Often we need to plot the response values for binary cases of a classifier. The graph below is created to simulate one seen at http://www.people.vcu.edu/ web site of the shock index for subjects with or without a pulmonary embolism. In this case, the data is simulated for illustration purposes only. There
We’ve all heard the tales about garlic protecting against evil and warding off vampires, but garlic is much more than an accessory to be worn around your neck at Halloween! Garlic provides numerous health benefits and is one of the most popular seasoning ingredients around. It goes well in almost
In a previous blog post I showed how to order a set of variables by a statistic. After reshaping data, you can create a graph that contains box plots for many variables. Ordering the variables by some statistic (mean, median, variance,...) helps to differentiate and distinguish the variables. You can
I’m sure, like me, you've been annoyed at being stuck in a traffic jam in a city centre somewhere, or been frustrated at your kids leaving lights on, or annoyed with the heating coming on when the weather’s warmed up and you've not got round to adjusting the thermostat. Now,
Capital investment in production capability is the weakest link in the business value chain. It always has been and likely always will be. It’s the driving force behind the tendency towards cartels, collusion and monopolies. While it can make the first entrant into a brand new market, in the long
Imagine you are the race director for a Formula One car. Decisions must be made within seconds, sometimes in the blink of an eye. When speed is of utmost importance, it is necessary for race engineers to have all relevant race data at their fingertips. Instead of having a couple of
When I create a graph of data that contains a categorical variable, I rarely want to display the categories in alphabetical order. For example, the box plot to the left is a plot of 10 standardized variables where the variables are ordered by their median value. The ordering makes it
Okay, let's say your data is in Hadoop. The distributed, open source framework is configured as it should be across low-cost servers and your data is sitting in those clusters. It's been a meaningful effort to get to this point but how does it benefit your organization? If it's not doing something
And now for the five steps: 1. Ignore industry benchmarks, past performance, arbitrary objectives, and what management "needs" your accuracy to be. Published benchmarks of industry forecasting performance are not relevant. See this prior post The perils of forecasting benchmarks for explanation. Previous forecasting performance may be interesting to know, but
“It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.” ~Dale Carnegie It seems like these days, as Americans rush around from task to task, with a “to do”
It is after Labor Day in the US, meaning we must no longer wear white shoes, skirts, jackets, or trousers. But even if you are now going sans-culotte, it is time to begin thinking about organizational performance objectives for 2015. Setting forecasting performance objectives is one way for management to shine...or
The major benefit of 64-bit applications is that they no longer have the memory limitation imposed by their 32-bit predecessors. This is why many SAS customers are making the transition from 32-bit SAS to 64-bit SAS. The move to 64-bit SAS can be daunting at first sight. There are many
I wanted to pass along this reminder from Pam Stroud at the International Institute of Forecasters: Grant to Promote Research on Forecasting For the twelfth year, the IIF, in collaboration with SAS®, is proud to announce financial support for research on how to improve forecasting methods and business forecasting practice.
Today is my fourth blog-iversary: the anniversary of my first blog post in 2010. To celebrate, I am going to write a series of fun posts based on The Code Book by Simon Singh, a fascinating account of the history of cryptography from ancient times until the present. While reading
Admit it - you were fascinated by the 3D pipes screensaver! How many CPU cycles did we let our machines burn up, drawing and re-drawing those silly pipes!?! What was your personal favorite CPU-hungry screensaver? (let us know in a comment!) Well, speaking of pipes, the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline
Writing my previous post about digital banks got me thinking about the widespread use of analytics. In his book Digital Bank, Chris Skinner states that data should be seen as the most critical asset for digital banks. Actually, this holds true for almost every company nowadays. If you don’t have data of
With the growing popularity and availability of online reviews and ratings, consumers have more information than ever before when purchasing a hotel stay. In order to build effective pricing and positioning strategies, hotel managers need to understand how consumers are using all of this user generated content with price to
While I was working on my recent blog post about two-dimensional binning, a colleague asked whether I would be discussing "the new hexagonal binning method that was added to the SURVEYREG procedure in SAS/STAT 13.2." I was intrigued: I was not aware that hexagonal binning had been added to a
At the KDD conference this week I heard a great invited presentation called How to Create a $1 billion Model in 20 days: Predictive Modeling in the Real World – A Sprint Case Study. It was presented by Tracey de Poalo from Sprint and former Kaggle President and well known
The ODS ExcelXP tagset has served us well over the years. It provides a reliable method to get formatted SAS output into Microsoft Excel workbooks, where the business world seems to like to live. And it's available in Base SAS, which means that you don't need SAS/ACCESS to PC Files
➤ DISCLOSURE! In June 2018 Google introduced changes to the way it handles its Maps platform. They now require API key in order to embed a map, plus Google Maps "projects" must now be associated with a billing account. Unless these new Google rules are met, Google maps described in
For far too long we have been using the venerable Scatter Plot to do the work of placing text strings in the graph. For far too long we have used the Scatter Plot or the Block Plot to place axis aligned text in the graphs. It is time to
