I had the opportunity to moderate a roundtable discussion on risk management at the International Institute for Analytics’ (IIA) winter symposium in Orlando earlier this month. I set the stage for the session with a brief overview of my favorite risk approach, “Competing on Value”, by Mack Hannan and Peter
When the Apple Macintosh hit the market, analysts were not impressed. But Steve Jobs’ vision ended up transforming our lives. Apple is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year and has become a global household name. Jobs’ ability to direct his organization to develop easy to use products not only met
Teacher pay, and the possibility of a raise, has been a hot topic in North Carolina lately. So I decided to look around and see if I could find any good data related to teacher salary, and then try to determine the best way to present that data graphically. I found that
Last week’s Winter Storm Pax closed schools, businesses and government here in the eastern US. Perhaps we were inspired by warm thoughts of America’s capital city in the spring. Perhaps spending so many days at home alone underscored the value of sharing information and insights with coworkers. Or, perhaps after
Last week's SAS Talks session, My Favorite SAS Enterprise Guide 5.1 Tricks, was remarkable in several ways. First, the featured presenter was Marje Fecht, who also serves as the conference chair for SAS Global Forum 2014. She's an avid SAS professional who loves to educate her fellow SAS users on
A fundamental operation in statistical data analysis is to fit a statistical regression model on one set of data and then evaluate the model on another set of data. The act of evaluating the model on the second set of data is called scoring. One of first "tricks" that I
Browsing graphs on the web, this graph caught my eye: The Arctic Sea Ice Volume Graph. My interest is not so much in the debate on Climate Change or Global Warming. To me, this graph has some interesting features that can help show the benefits of plot layering to
I was recently part of team discussing enterprise architecture with a chief IT architect, and we were explaining how SAS can integrate into their existing infrastructure, add business value on top it and even fit into their future planned infrastructure. This conversation was one of the reasons I blogged about
Today is Valentine's Day, and for many people it will be a day to celebrate with their significant other. Whether it's expressed by a nice dinner out, a bouquet of roses, or a big box of chocolates, there's no doubt that love will be in the air. It reminds me
With the 2014 Winter Olympics in full force, many of you may be spending your free time cheering on your favorite athletes and marveling at their amazing abilities. Aren’t the athletes amazing in the way they spin, twirl, and fly through carefully practiced routines? The amount of preparation, practice, and
The attention of the world is now on Sochi and the Winter Games. Gold, Silver and Bronze medals are being earned by these amazing athletes, and everyone has an eye on the tally. Andre sent me a link to TRinker's R Blog, showing a graph of the current tally. Andre
Valentine’s Day is one of those make-or-break holidays for gift retailers. They are selling "nice to have" items, not necessities. Many use some type of analytics to segment customers for personalized messages. It's not as straightforward as it sounds, especially if the organization hasn't committed to an enterprise-wide approach to
Here in the SAS Performance Lab, we’re seeing more and more SAS sites moving their SAS® 9 application workloads to Windows Server 2012. Now that we’ve had sufficient time to gather feedback from early implementers of SAS on these systems, we thought you might want a recap of some of
No doubt many folks feel an energy slump in the winter months. Short days and long nights plus the added drain of gray or rainy days can dampen our spirits. Did you know certain nutrients may help calm anxiety or boost your spirits? If you feel a drop in your
Although I currently work as a statistician, my original training was in mathematics. In many mathematical fields there is a result that is so profound that it earns the name "The Fundamental Theorem of [Topic Area]." A fundamental theorem is a deep (often surprising) result that connects two or more
It's true: you can use the Microsoft Visual Studio Express tools to build custom tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide and the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. And I said as much in my book, Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide Using Microsoft .NET. I even provided step-by-step instructions for how
Wrigley Field turns 100 this year and the city of Chicago turns 177. You can turn analytics pro at any age with the winning line-up of courses offered at the magnificent Two Prudential Plaza. Below are some Business Knowledge Series course suggestions but be sure to check out the complete
Hopefully, you’ve listened to SAS Global Forum 2014 Conference Chair Marje Fecht talk about the focus on content at this year’s conference. The Conference Scheduler is central to achieving that goal, helping you easily find and schedule the presentations, tutorials and activities that meet your needs and interests. In this
One of my favorite new features of SAS/IML 12.1 enables you to define functions that contain default values for parameters. This is extremely useful when you want to write a function that has optional arguments. Example: Centering a data vector It is simple to specify a SAS/IML module with a
One of the most popular graph amongst clinical and pharmaceutical users is the Survival Plot as created from the LIFETEST Procedure. This is one graph that users most often want to customize. See Creating and Customizing the Kaplan-Meier Survival Plot in PROC LIFETEST - Warren F. Kuhfeld and Ying So, SAS Institute
When the Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl, they didn’t do it because of just one factor – a great quarterback or an amazing running back. It was widely considered a team effort, helmed by a visionary coach who worked on developing a strong culture, cultivating the right players and
I'm a big believer in both/and thinking, so I'll stand squarely in the middle and say that the most important skills for competitive advantage in analytics include a combination of top-notch modeling abilities along with business acumen, critical thinking, and curiosity. I was intrigued by a blog post on this
We get very little snow in Wake County, NC (SAS Headquarters) - therefore when we do have snow, it's a big deal and they close the schools. Which made me wonder ... how much snow does it take to close schools in the rest of the US? Last week we got our
This isn't the first blog post to laud the "Note" feature of SAS Enterprise Guide. You know, the feature that allows you to add documentation to describe what the heck your project or process flow is actually doing. For example, Tricia described 3 useful ways to use the note feature.
Recent studies show that the annual winter migration of millions of monarch butterflies from the US to Mexico is at risk of disappearing - can SAS graphics help change that?!? When I was a kid (not that long ago), one of my main activities was the 4-H Entomology project. I
Finding the root (or zero) of a function is an important computational task because it enables you to solve nonlinear equations. I have previously blogged about using Newton's method to find a root for a function of several variables. I have also blogged about how to use the bisection method
Acronyms are funny things. Need an example? Try decoding this sentence: How is event stream processing (ESP), applied to electrical submersible pumps (ESP) in the oil and gas industry, like extrasensory perception (ESP)? Even if you had extrasensory perception you would still need some clarification if that sentence contained acronyms only.
SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Global Forum -- two of my favorite things! And I get to talk about both of them in this post. I'm a devoted SAS Enterprise Guide user, and I hope you're learning how useful this tool can be as well. On February 13, I'll be sharing
Last week I showed three ways to sample with replacement in SAS. You can use the SAMPLE function in SAS/IML 12.1 to sample from a finite set or you can use the DATA step or PROC SURVEYSELECT to extract a random sample from a SAS data set. Sampling without replacement
Most simple graphs generally include graphical representation of data using various plot type such as bar charts, scatter plots, histograms, box plots step plots and more. Both SG procedures and GTL provide many easy ways to create such graphs. However, for many real world use cases, we need to display related textual data in
