Gerhard Svolba, author of Data Preparation for Analytics Using SAS, is working on his second book for SAS Press and this time around he’s also writing about his experience—writing the book. I’m really enjoying his weekly blog The Creation of the Book: Data Quality for Analytics. Gerhard, who resides in
Do you have many points in your scatter plots that overlap each other? If so, your graph exhibits overplotting. Overplotting occurs when many points have similar coordinates. For example, the following scatter plot (which is produced by using the ODS statistical graphics procedure, SGPLOT) displays 12,000 points, many of which
I read the new book Enterprise Social Media Strategy last weekend and came away from it feeling like I had just attended a useful two-day social media conference. You know the feeling, right? Your head is swimming with ideas from lots of great people who are smarter or braver or
The ODS Graphics Designer allows you to design and build your own statistical graphs in SAS, without having to learn how to program in the new graph template language (GTL). The ODS Graphics Designer is a rich user interface that allows you to design these graphs based upon your own
I don't use the SAS macro language very often. Because the SAS/IML language has statements for looping and evaluating expressions, I rarely write a macro function as part of a SAS/IML programs. Oh, sure, I use the %LET statement to define global constants, but I seldom use the %DO and
I feel the experience of participating at SAS Global Forum year after year is like relishing a warm brownie! It’s the same treat but a unique experience every time. Subtle changes in the ingredients can lead to a unique and enhanced flavor. The team behind the scenes works hard to
One of the most popular blogs for SAS users is the Do Loop blog, where Rick Wicklin presents tips and techniques for statistical programming in SAS, with an emphasis on SAS/IML programs. Even if you're not a programmer, you have to appreciate the way Rick brings statistics to bear on
Will I be in Las Vegas for for SAS Global Forum 2011? "You can bet on it!" In fact, I will be there and be square, since I am one of the statisticians who will represent SAS Research and Development. This year, I'm focused on three main activities: Presenting a
Tapan Patel and I recently caught up with Dean Abbott, President, Abbott Analytics for a Q&A session on Predictive Analytics World that takes place during Data Driven Busines Week March 14-15 in San Francisco. Question: Any thoughts you would like to share for upcoming Predictive Analytics World 2011 Conference? What
Late last year I had the pleasure of kicking off a conference in Raleigh, called the Internet Summit. SAS was a title sponsor, and I was tagged with keynote introduction. It was my veritable 2 minutes of fame. I did all of my homework and knew a few interesting facts
If you haven't signed up for SAS Global Forum 2011 in Las Vegas, you'd better get moving: February 28 is the last day for early registration and the discounted hotel prices. You should also sign up for the pre-conference statistical tutorials, which are filling up fast! I was tempted to
eMetrics is always a great event for us. Internally, we often fight over who manages and attends the event, because it’s such a good time. Thankfully, because I’m based closer to the West Coast than my counterpart, I’ve won the right two years running. Last year, in San Jose, we
As we discussed last week, the forecasting process is often contaminated by individuals whose input makes the forecast worse. Sometimes this is intentional. For example, if I'm tired of hearing customers complain about out-of-stocks on retail shelves, I'll try to drive up the forecast so that more inventory will be
I was inspired by Chris Hemedinger's blog posts about his daughter's science fair project. Explaining statistics to a pre-teenager can be a humbling experience. My 11-year-old son likes science. He recently set about trying to measure which of three projectile launchers is the most accurate. I think he wanted to
Live tweeting offers a great way to stay plugged in to the key happenings around an event both for attendees and for those unable to attend the event physically. Typically, when it comes to large events it’s nearly impossible to hit all the places when there are concurrent presentations or
I’m sure you will all agree that a programmer’s favorite task is to maximize efficiency thus enhancing performance. Dear reader, in this blog post I’ll share my best programming practices so that you can benefit from what I typically show my students in class. At the end I’d like to
I don't know much about the SQL procedure, but I know that it is powerful. According to the SAS documentation for the SQL procedure, "PROC SQL can perform some of the operations that are provided by the DATA step and the PRINT, SORT, and SUMMARY procedures." Recently, a fellow blogger,
Recently, I read Dr. AnnMaria De Mars' blog post "Translating Ruby to SAS (or vice versa)." I found that I really liked it, and not just because she mentions me (although that was pretty cool). But rather, I like the end of the post, where she identifies a key value
Pete Lund has been an active leader with SAS Global Forum for many, many years. This year he is the Section Chair for the brand new Social Media & Networking Section (being a Social Media Specialist, I personally cannot wait for this track). Pete provided us with some feedback about
When upgrading from an existing 4.2 client install of SAS Add-in to MS Office, you are not prompted to enable the Outlook portion of the Add-in. As SAS points out in the KB Post http://support.sas.com/kb/40/272.html, there is a 'Switcher Utility' available in the client install. When running this, I would
If you are a statistical programmer, sooner or later you have to compute a confidence interval. In the SAS/IML language, some beginning programmers struggle with forming a confidence interval. I don't mean that they struggle with the statistics (they know how to compute the relevant quantities), I mean that they
There are two very different ways to think about keywords on the Web: one is for writers and one is for researchers. Web copywriters are often advised to use keywords that customers type into search engines. Researchers, on the other hand, are told to focus on the words that customers
A recurring theme of The Business Forecasting Deal (both this blog and the book) is that forecasting is a huge waste of management time. This doesn't mean that forecasting is pointless, irrelevant, or entirely useless in running our organizations. It only means that the amount of time, money, and human
The Flowing Data blog posted some data about how much TV actors get paid per episode. About a dozen folks have created various visualizations of the data (see the comments in the Flowing Data blog), several of them very glitzy and fancy. One variable in the data is a categorical
I've known several people who were raised during the Great Depression, and I've observed that they are very mindful of waste. My wife's grandmother used to save plastic bags, twist ties, and relatively clean aluminum foil for potential reuse in the household -- because such materials were once scarce. The
I recently had the privilege to work with Charlene Li, one of our industry's thought leaders, on a Webinar that SAS sponsored and the American Marketing Association produced, titled "Drive Marketing Relevance in Today's Digital World." The SAS host and architect of the discussion's content was Jonathan Hornby, one of
Suppose that you want to create a matrix in SAS/IML software that has a special structure, such as a tridiagonal matrix. How do you do it? Or suppose that you want to find elements of a matrix A such that A[i,j] satisfies a certain condition. How do you get the
Anne Milley and I recently had the chance to catch up with Eric Siegel, Chair of Predictive Analytics World for some Q&A regarding the upcoming conference that takes place during Data Driven Busines Week March 14-15 in San Francisco. Question: What a great line-up we see shaping up for Predictive
How important is accurate telecom forecasting? Sitting through another presentation this week on the explosive growth of mobile data, and the eye-popping statistics about how many Facebook and Twitter users there are, I can’t help but be excited by the possibilities. But I also have this feeling of déjà vu
Brian Whittington mentioned last month that government is innovating, and at great speed. Based on what I’ve seen in our line of work with state and local governments around the country in the past year, I have to agree. In the face of today’s daunting fiscal challenges, state and local
