The 2011 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) will be from July 31-August 3 in Miami Beach. Look for acquisitions editor and SAS Press conference mega-maven Shelley Sessoms at the SAS Publishing booth (#504). Shelley can talk with you about: New and forthcoming statistics-related books from SAS Press, including Statistical Analysis for
To re-use an old phrase: “May you live in interesting times.” And we certainly do. Today, Fareed Zakaria addressed these interesting times in his keynote address at The Premier Business Leadership Series, titled "A Roadmap Out of the Economic Crisis." Asked, “Which one of the following economic regions do you
A panel of risk experts gave their reaction to the publication of the fifth global risk management survey report undertaken by SAS and the Economist Intelligence Unit. The report suggests that while lessons have been learned, some institutions may be sliding into complacency. At any rate, risk appetites are growing
As a new contributor to SAS' Customer Analytics blog, I want to take the opportunity to virtually introduce myself. My name is Jonathan Moran, and I’m relatively new to the world of Product Marketing at SAS. However, what I’m not new to is assisting customers in answering important questions like:
Last year Jim Goodnight shared the stage with Bill Green (the then CEO of Accenture) and talked about what it takes to build an analytical organization. This year Dr. Goodnight was with Pierre Nanterme, the current CEO of Accenture and they talked about what it means to lead an analytical
A colleague asked, "How can I enumerate the levels of a categorical classification variable in SAS/IML software?" The variable was a character variable with n observations, but he wanted the following: A "look-up table" that contains the k (unique) levels of the variable. A vector with n elements that contains
Sometime very recently, probably while you weren't looking, I changed jobs at SAS (yes, again). This time it's a bigger change for me, because I'm no longer part of the SAS R&D organization, where I've worked for nearly 14 years. Instead, I'm part of the team known internally as Professional
One of the astonishing benefits of my job is getting to travel to beautiful places around the world to meet with customers and prospective customers at The Premier Business Leadership Series conferences. This year is no exception, the historical city of Antwerp as our backdrop, where hundreds have gathered to
This is the year of the Marketer. We are emerging as leaders in business due to our unique blend of abilities to gain insights from market and customer data and our keen interest in people. We are active in Social Media and Karl Gustafson reminds us in Elevating The Role
Now that the flurry of SAS Global Forum 2011 in Las Vegas has died down, you can take a little time to catch up on some of the reading you said you'd get to. For instance, have you worked your way through the proceedings? They are located here. And I
My primary purpose in writing The DO Loop blog is to share what I know about statistical programming in general and about SAS programming in particular. But I also write the blog for various personal reasons, including the enjoyment of writing. The other day I encountered a concept on Ajay
Do You Wow Your Customers or Give Them Woe? That was the question addressed during a SAS sponsored presentation at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Francisco. In this video, Retha Keyser, Business Development Manager for the SAS Customer Intelligence Global Practice, talks about using customer analytics to solve
No, BONEZONE is not the website of wayward legislators. It is, however, a trade journal of the orthopaedic devices industry, and the Summer 2011 issue features a nice mention of Forecast Value Added (FVA) analysis in an article by Tom Wallace. In "Forecasting: It's Getting Better," Tom refers to FVA
Policing has profoundly changed over the last several decades and its evolution will continue as long as there are crimes to commit and communities to serve. The very nature of policing is dynamic – it always has been and always will be. Those dynamics are driven by many things –
Over at the SAS/IML Discussion Forum, there have been several posts about how to call a Base SAS functions from SAS/IML when the Base SAS function supports a variable number of arguments. It is easy to call a Base SAS function from SAS/IML software when the syntax for the function
Writing efficient SAS/IML programs is very important. One aspect to efficient SAS/IML programming is to avoid unnecessary DO loops. In my book, Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software, I wrote (p. 80): One way to avoid writing unnecessary loops is to take full advantage of the subscript reduction operators for matrices.
There is nothing the gambler, investor, forecaster, or Match.com dater likes as much as the sure thing. Don't we all? Back in April I stated what I claimed to be a sure thing forecast: In any group of 2 or more people, there is at least one pair of people
In a previous blog post, I presented a short SAS/IML function module that implements the trapezoidal rule. The trapezoidal rule is a numerical integration scheme that gives the integral of a piecewise linear function that passes through a given set of points. This article demonstrates an application of using the
Many of you have been following along as I’ve written about the work we’re doing at SAS to evolve our lead generation strategies. This effort has given me a voice with a number of media outlets; allowing me to communicate, with a larger audience, the importance of analytics and integration
In a previous article I discussed the situation where you have a sequence of (x,y) points and you want to find the area under the curve that is defined by those points. I pointed out that usually you need to use statistical modeling before it makes sense to compute the
While school is out (for most) for the summer, many will find this week's SAS Author's tip to be a good primer or refresher about the WHERE statement. Our featured author Sandra Schlotzhauer draws on her extensive career teaching basic statistics to non-statisticians in sharing lessons for grown-ups in her
This year we’re happy to be working with Harvard Business Review on a series of Customer Intelligence Insight Centers and Webinars. The first of those webinars happened recently featuring Harvard Business School Professor Ranjay Gulati. Here are a few teaser sentences from the HBR Blog post. If you’re interested, click-through
As organizations confront the limits of forecasting, they finally realize the folly in a blind pursuit of unachievable levels of forecast accuracy. The best accuracy we can ever hope to achieve is limited by the nature -- the forecastability -- of what we are trying to forecast. Anything better than
I was under the impression that Black Swans were supposed to be rare. Rare enough to be effectively non-computable by standard methods. Nassim Taleb’s formulation of the Black Swan Theory is comprised of the three traits of: outlier (rarity), extreme impact, and retrospective predictability (i.e. 20/20 hindsight). I write this
The other day I was asked, "Given a set of points, what is the area under the curve defined by those points?" As stated, the problem is not well defined. The problem is that "the curve defined by those points" doesn't have a precise meaning. However, after gathering more information,
Are you a SAS Enterprise Guide user? If so, you are in luck. SAS Press author Neil Constable provides the inspiration for this week's SAS Author's tip. And this book is more than just a pretty face (the cover photographs very nicely). You'll find rich content from beginning to end.
SAS Enterprise Guide has about 150 options that you can customize in the Tools->Options window. With each release, the development team adds a few more options that have been asked for by customers, and they rarely decommission any existing options. It's getting quite crowded on some of those options windows!
Recently I had to compute the trace of a product of square matrices. That is, I had two large nxn matrices, A and B, and I needed to compute the quantity trace(A*B). Furthermore, I was going to compute this quantity thousands of times for various A and B as part
SAS is the underwriter of a MeriTalk study released today that focuses on “The Federal Efficiency Opportunity”. The study uncovered meaningful insights into how federal managers and professionals are trying to meet their goals while facing enormous budget cuts. The study was done after President Obama’s Deficit Commission suggested in
The basic big data problem is simple to understand: we create too much data to store and analyze it all. The problem gets bigger, however, when you consider the related factors: our problems themselves are getting bigger, the analytics needed to solve them are more complex and the data is
