In a classic Saturday Night Live skit back in the 70s, Dan Aykroyd portrays a man promoting his book about being mauled by a bear. Aykroyd says, “I want to emphasize – Never feed a marshmallow to a grizzly bear like this” He places a marshmallow partly in his mouth
This post is about an estimate, but not the statistical kind. It also provides yet another example in which the arithmetic mean is not the appropriate measure for a computation. First, some background. Last week I read a blog post by Peter Flom that reminded me that it is wrong
Let's pretend for a moment that you don't have SAS installed on all of your office computers. But you've got some great content locked away inside SAS data sets. Is there a way to get to the content of that data, without having to push the data through a SAS
Increase the odds of winning for you and your company in 2011 by attending SAS Global Forum at Caesar’s Palace, April 4-7, in Las Vegas. For the past 36 years, this conference has attracted over 3,000 SAS users and over 400 SAS professionals from across the globe. It’s a sure
Today I'm in San Diego at the 2010 meeting of the Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS). I am giving several presentations on SAS/IML and SAS/IML Studio: A tutorial workshop on SAS/IML Studio for the SAS/STAT User. The material in this tutorial is a small sampling of Chapters 4–11 of
This is the second in my two-post interview series with Gert Laursen and Jesper Thorlund, authors of the book, Business Analytics for Managers: Taking Business Intelligence Beyond Reporting. Part one covered data visualization and the cross-functional purpose of business analytics. Here, we talk about analytic talent, measuring innovation and educating
In this blog and in the book Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software, I present tips and techniques for writing efficient SAS/IML programs for data analysis, simulation, matrix computations, and other topics of interest to statistical programmers. When I was writing my book, one of the reviewers commented that he wasn’t
Many forecasting software packages support hierarchical forecasting. You define the hierarchical relationship of your products and locations, create forecasts at one or more levels, and then reconcile the forecasts across the full hierarchy. In a top-down approach, you generate forecasts at the highest level and apportion it down to lower
How can you change a programming trick into a programming treat? Try this algorithm: If you develop a clever snippet of code, squirrel it away. This snippet is a "trick." If you use the trick a second time, copy and modify the code. The trick has become a "treat." If
More than 30 Premier Business Leadership Series attendees gathered for a roundtable discussion of social media in retail. "Is Your Company Antisocial? How to Effectively Engage Consumers Through Social Media and Mobility," was hosted by Michelle Thomas, Senior Brand Marketing Manager at Zappos. She was joined by Lori Schafer and
When Chris Brogan started his social media marketing agency New Marketing Labs, he stated that he would only work with Fortune 100 companies. He had no clients at the time, but lo and behold, Fortune 100 companies came calling. Now the agency’s client list includes Sony, Microsoft, PepsiCo, all of
How do you maintain a local feel in a central organization of 810 department stores in 45 states? Speaking at The Premier Business Leadership Series in Las Vegas, Steve Nevill, Executive Vice President of Inventory Management and Support for Macy’s.shared how the retailer (which had $23.5 billion in sales in
Organizations have massive amounts of data at their disposal, yet they often fail to utilize it in any meaningful way. But analytics is enabling many firms to aggressively use their data in key business processes with impressive results. You have more information at hand about your business than ever before,
Jim Davis, SAS CMO’s keynote address at the Premier Business Leadership Series this morning was about anticipating and managing change, including these six questions all organizations need to ask: Where should we leverage business analytics? Any part of a business can benefit, but the payoff is greatest where you are
Banks and bankers took a beating as a result of the recent financial crisis and recession. That beating wasn’t reserved for large Manhattan banks. Smaller community banks and regionals were painted with the same brush as the one used for those who nearly broke our global financial system – customers
Monster.com was the pioneer in the online recruitment industry. To maintain its competitive advantage more than a decade later, the company has taken the data-driven road using research, business intelligence and predictive analytics. Jean-Paul Isson, Vice President of Global BI and Predictive Analytics at Monster Worldwide spoke today about how
At the Premier Business Leadership Series today, Paul Arsego of Northeast Utilities offered up these ten steps to advancing business analytics adoption – to a packed house of attendees. Given the standing room only for his presentation – and the attendance at this conference -- it seems that people are
Are you up to date on your hotfixes for SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1? If you're not certain of the answer, you'll find out next week when you might see this message appear: This version of SAS Enterprise Guide will expire on December 1st, 2010. If you've applied any SAS Enterprise
The SAS/IML language provides the QUAD function for evaluating one-dimensional integrals. You can also use the QUAD function to compute a double integral as an iterated integral. A One-Dimensional Integration Suppose you want to evaluate the following integral: To evaluate this integral in the SAS/IML language: Define a function module
I recommend the book Business Analytics for Managers: Taking Business Intelligence Beyond Reporting for managers who want a strategic view on what it takes to create ongoing value from data. To tap into more of the strategic thinking in this book, I asked authors Gert Laursen and Jesper Thorlund a
~Contributed by Sara Jones~ It’s October and there’s a chill in the air. In North Carolina that means State Fair time. Now, for those who are not from the U.S., or for those who are, but don’t live in “the South” -- you may not know what this means. Think
We've just pushed out the localized versions of the Getting Started with SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3 tutorial. This is the tutorial that you'll see when you select Help->Getting Started Tutorial from within SAS Enterprise Guide. Here is a list of the supported languages, and links to the tutorial content: English
I was recently asked how to create a tridiagonal matrix in SAS/IML software. For example, how can you easily specify the following symmetric tridiagonal matrix without typing all of the zeros? proc iml; m = {1 6 0 0 0, 6 2 7 0 0, 0 7 3 8 0,
The question came up on the SAS Enterprise Guide discussion forum: which do you prefer, List Report Wizard (PROC REPORT) or Summary Tables (PROC TABULATE)? And as with most SAS-related questions, the proper response is: "it depends." If you put these two PROCs in the ring with a Google Fight,
Facebook now uses technology to help detect instances of cyberbullying before it gets out of hand. I heard this report on CNN last week, and the Facebook spokesman described their detection techniques as "background technology that I can't really talk about." We don't know for certain what techniques Facebook employs
In a previous post, I discussed how to use the LOC function to eliminate loops over observations. Dale McLerran chimed in to remind me that another way to improve efficiency is to use subscript reduction operators. I ended my previous post by issuing a challenge: can you write an efficient
It's like I was saying earlier: when used for good, statistics can inform your sound decisions and opinions. But stats can be used to mislead, as well. LifeHacker.com offers some basic guidance on this subject. And what if you already have the numbers you want to share, but you want
In honor of the United Nations World Statistics Day (October 20, 2010), let’s not leave finance out of the party. In fact, let’s continue with our focus from last time on the analytical and decision support payback afforded by Activity-based costing, perhaps the most underappreciated finance tool for adding value
I am not a statistician, but I love statistics. Statistics are facts, and when used for good, they are an important ingredient in sound decision making about almost any issue, whether it's about government policy or your personal behavior. The use of statistics has gone way beyond counting things, computing
Today is World Statistics Day, an event set up to "highlight the role of official statistics and the many achievements of the national statistical system." I want to commemorate World Statistics Day by celebrating the role of the US government in data collection and dissemination. Data analysis begins with data.
