I’m excited to publish a new segment of our “Nuts & Bolts of Social Media” video series. In this interview, SAS’ Lori Schafer talks briefly with Michelle Thomas and Jaimee Newberry from Zappos. Michelle, a Senior Brand Marketing Manager, and Jaimee, a Product Manager & UI Designer, both offer up
Recently, I needed to detect whether a matrix consists entirely of missing values. I wrote the following module: proc iml; /** Module to detect whether all elements of a matrix are missing values. Works for both numeric and character matrices. Version 1 (not optimal) **/ start isMissing(x); if type(x)='C' then
Predictive analytics is not the easiest concept to wrap your head around. It’s all too easy to get lost in explanations about statistics, game theory, modeling, and the rest, and end up with a muddy understanding of a process that draws on historical facts, like customer data, to make predictions
This year’s winners of the Best Paper Award at SAS Belux Forum 2010 have been given a trip to SAS Global Forum 2011 in Las Vegas. Attending any SAS users group event is an exciting opportunity to meet other SAS users and learn new ways to use SAS, but this
As I mentioned in an earlier post, having an information strategy and analytic goals tied to key business objectives are critical components of being able to competitively leverage your analytic assets and capabilities. In general, in the insurance industry vertical I support, we don’t see many organizations that have a
There are three kinds of programming errors: parse-time errors, run-time errors, and logical errors. It doesn't matter what language you are using (SAS/IML, MATLAB, R, C/C++, Java,....), these errors creep up everywhere. Two of these errors cause a program to report an error, whereas the third is more insidious because
Deb Orton recently had a chance to speak with Bruce Bedford, VP of Marketing Analytics and Consumer Insights at Oberweis Dairy about social media and its role in how they do business. Oberweis Dairy is based in the Midwest and reaches its customers through 48 store locations, its home-delivery business
Here is my published Google Reader bundle that contains all of the SAS- or analytics-related blogs that are maintained by customers or others in the SAS community (excepting those by SAS employees, for which I have a different bundle). Blogs by SAS Customers AFHood Analytics Group - Blogs AnnMaria's Blog
These are the blogs that I follow that happen to be written by SAS employees. I've assembled them into a Google Reader bundle, which I have shared. I have another bundle for SAS-related blogs written by others in the community. Blogs by SAS Employees A Shot in the Arm Blog-Normal
I helped to write a quiz for the Computer Science Education Week promotions that were featured on our company intranet. Do you fancy yourself as a Comp-Sci aficionado? Let's see how you do with these. 1. Which achievement is Charles Babbage most famous for? A. Establishing software retail shops in
Last week, several of the faculty members of the International Institute for Analytics (IIA) —Tom Davenport, Jeanne Harris, James Taylor, John Elder, Bill Franks, Niel Nickolaisen, Jeremy Shapiro and I—offered some predictions for analytics in the coming year. You can hear an audio recording of the discussion or read a
While insufficiently endowed to be called a "get rich quick" scheme, here is a good way to pocket an extra $5,000 for your holiday shopping budget, and contribute to the body of forecasting knowledge. For the ninth straight year, SAS announces funding of two $5,000 research grants to be awarded
Imagine you are attending the BCS National Championship game next month. You have invested top dollar in your seats and you have been anticipating the game for weeks. You settle in to your seat with your hot dog, soft pretzel, and your favorite beverage a few minutes before kick-off because
Both covariance matrices and correlation matrices are used frequently in multivariate statistics. You can easily compute covariance and correlation matrices from data by using SAS software. However, sometimes you are given a covariance matrix, but your numerical technique requires a correlation matrix. Other times you are given a correlation matrix,
If you're like most large organizations, you've got a bunch of business intelligence and analytic applications at your fingertips. In my prior organization, a large insurance company, I believe the magic number of tools that the organization had to support was north of 40. No kidding. Now, this is a
I connect to more SAS server environments than your average SAS user. In a given week, I probably run SAS Enterprise Guide connecting to at least five different Windows-based servers, a few Unix-based servers, and maybe even a z/OS machine as well. With that many SAS environments, I'm bound to
Sample covariance matrices and correlation matrices are used frequently in multivariate statistics. This post shows how to compute these matrices in SAS and use them in a SAS/IML program. There are two ways to compute these matrices: Compute the covariance and correlation with PROC CORR and read the results into
I enjoy reading about the Le Monde puzzles (and other topics!) at Christian Robert's blog. Recently he asked how to convert a number with s digits into a numerical vector where each element of the vector contains the corresponding digit (by place value). For example, if the number is 4321,
Computer science is more than the pursuit of "let's see what we can make this computer do." If that's your only goal, then you might make a fine computer geek, but a lousy computer scientist. In her blog post for Computer Science Education Week, Caroline McCullen reminds us that computer
I’ll never forget the first time many years ago that I saw the Dilbert cartoon by Scott Adams showing Dilbert getting transferred to marketing, approaching a doorway that says “Welcome to Marketing - Two Drink Minimum.” I found it so funny until I realized that my friends in IT and
A professional acquaintance and an expert in statistics once told me that if you don't understand how to perform the process of analytics through programming - the creation of the data flow, the transformation of the variables and the development of the statistical procedure - then you had no business
In this ongoing series about people with SASonality, today’s introduction is Diane Hatcher, a Solutions Architect from SAS Technology Practice. Diane and I had exchanged e-mails many times before meeting face-to-face for the first time at SESUG 2010. Every time I passed through the SAS Solutions Center, I noticed that
The SAS/IML language enables you to perform matrix-vector computations. However, it also provides a convenient "shorthand notation" that enables you to perform elementwise operation on rows or columns in a natural way. You might know that the SAS/IML language supports subscript reduction operators to compute basic rowwise or columnwise quantities.
I'm back in the office after two enjoyable days at the Internet Summit in Raleigh, NC. (I hadn't seen that many nerds since the family reunion on my dad's side.) Among the many good sessions was one about building your blog audience by making the blog more search friendly. The
My last post was a criticism of a statistical graph that appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek. Criticism is easy. Analysis is harder. In this post I re-analyze the data to present two graphics that I think should have replaced the one graphic in Businessweek. You can download the SAS program that
Have you used multivariate procedures in SAS and wanted to save out scores? Some procedures, such as FACTOR, CANDISC, CANCORR, PRINCOMP, and others have an OUT= option to save scores to the input data set. However, to score a new data set, or to perform scoring with multivariate procedures that
It seems like each week brings news announcing yet another software vendor acquisition by one of the giant software conglomerates. This approach of purchasing a specific capability to fit into the ever growing portfolio of technology does not show signs of stopping in the near future. Matter of fact, several
Last week I was invited to join the growing list of SAS blogs in the new sas-x.com aggregator. I was happy to add my blog there -- anything that I can do to help this content get to a wider audience. If you have a SAS-related blog, I encourage you
In April, I wrote 12 ways to write a conference blog post. It's one of those posts that I continue to share and often see others reference as well. One thing that might be implied in that post but isn't overtly stated is something of a golden rule for for
This is a continuation of my last post, Lunchtime Reading—4 Steps to Getting Started with a Lead Nurturing System. SAS’ recently implemented Lead Nurturing System is a calculated means to better serve our prospects and customers, while moving us along a continuum of turning our marketing data into more of
