Susan and Lora share all of the details on the OpenMic blog. (You can also see it on the SAS Publishing Facebook page.) I was pleased to have reviewed the book for technical content before it was published. As usual, Susan and Lora did a great job; they know what
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It is that time of the year again! Rexer Analytics, a data mining consulting firm, is conducting their fourth annual data mining survey. The survey collects preferences, views and interests of data mining professionals (e.g. data miners, statisticians, modelers, analysts, etc.). SAS is not the sponsor of the survey. The
Why does this SAS program produce an error? proc means data=sashelp.cars mean median min max; by origin; run; It's because SASHELP.CARS is a SAS data set, and SAS data sets observations are stored and processed sequentially, and a BY group operation requires that the observations are already grouped and sorted
I edited my first issue of sascom magazine in the second quarter. Despite her new responsibilities, former Editor-in-Chief Alison Bolen made herself available for my many questions, concerns and frantic messages asking: “Does this sound okay??” It all came together, and we even debuted a new column on business analytics,
Was it the economy? the timing? the location? or the brilliant and good looking Forum panel? That will be for history (or you) to decide. What we do know is that is that the Institute of Business Forecasting’s Best Practices Conference in San Francisco, April 28-30, drew a large and
I mentioned last time that the technique we use to determine topics is a variant of something that has been around for fifty years. In this part I will talk about the intriguing history of this technique, and in the process, I hope to illuminate what we are doing and
As more organizations are realizing greater value tapping into their time series data in new and innovative ways, we are often asked about books we would recommend on time series analysis. I have consulted with some internal experts and wanted to post this list of recommended books on the topic since
SAS and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) have announced the release of the 2010 EIU report, "Rebuilding trust: Next steps for risk management in financial services," sponsored by SAS. The 2010 report includes the results of an online survey - that attracted 346 global respondents, all executives with risk management
SAS catalogs have been around for a long time. Not quite as long as the Sears or L.L. Bean catalogs, but SAS customers have used catalogs to store and retrieve content for many years. A SAS catalog is a special type of SAS file that acts as a container, like
Curt Monash posted a nice summary of the current and planned offerings that help to make SAS analytics more available "in the database" -- allowing you to analyze your data quickly without having to move it around so much. If you use SAS with Teradata, Netezza, or DB2, much of
Welcome to SAS Training Post, the official blog of SAS Training & Certification! My name is Michele Reister and I am the social media manager for SAS Education. This blog will be a channel to provide you with value-add educational content to help you be a better SAS user. You’ll
This is the topic of an 8-minute video tip from SAS Education. What's great about this tip: not only does it show you how to keep historical versions of reports and data that you create in your projects, but it also provides a nice example of cross-tab reporting in SAS
My friend Tom Reilly of Automatic Forecasting Systems posted this comment on the INFORMS discussion group on LinkedIn: Some use all of the data and some withhold data to find the best forecasting model? Withholding is arbitrary as changing the withhold from x to y means a completely different model
One of my all-time favorite quotes is from John Tukey: “The best part about being a statistician is you get to play in everyone’s backyard."? Statistics (and more broadly, analytics) contributes to and draws from multiple disciplines. There is a unity to analytical methods: The same method used in quantitative
At SAS Global Forum this year, Clark Abrahams, Chief Financial Architect at SAS and author of Fair Lending Compliance and Credit Risk Assessment, offered me a piece of advice that I’m fairly certain is going to change my life. We were getting ready to begin the amazing book drawing for
In their book Analytics at Work; Smarter Decisions, Better Results authors Tom Davenport, Jeanne G Harris and Robert Morison describe a 5-stage process to becoming an Analytical Competitor. In this series of articles, I am going to describe my interpretation of what it means for CMOs to become analytical marketers,
I've just read that Sony plans to discontinue the manufacture of 3.5-inch floppy disks. [Update: a more complete tribute to the floppy disk is over on Geek News Central.] The announcement made me nostalgic for the days when we shipped The SAS System on floppies. I don't think we've done
Topic Modeling of documents is hot in the research community. Conferences are filled with different ways of determining topic models and how to apply them. The prestigious data mining conference KDD has in recent years had entire sections on topic modeling. The leading algorithms all have three-letter acronyms and sound
Little SAS Book author Susan Slaughter attended SAS Global Forum this year, as she always does. She had to travel to Seattle this time to get her hands on an early copy of her own new book, The Little SAS Book for SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2, which she updated with
I had the pleasure of attending Gongwei Chen’s SAS Global Forum 2010 presentation, Get Certified as an Advanced SAS® Programmer in Six Months or Less! As you might expect, Gongwei is a Certified Advanced Programmer. To become certified at the advanced level, a programmer must pass both the SAS Base
The SAS Social Media Analytics product launch was a huge hit with the press at SAS Global Forum. I wrote about it below, a lot of analysts and social media pros are blogging about it too, and it seemed for at least a few hours last Monday that everyone on
Those of you who have seen the new version of SAS Text Miner know that we are transitioning from a “document clustering” approach towards a “topics in documents” approach. I have received a lot of questions about this, so I thought I would address some of them in a multi-part
For a service organization like ours, there are few things more valuable, let me correct that, nothing is more valuable, than feedback from our users. We are really lucky in this regard; SAS users are not bashful about sharing their opinions when it comes to “their” software. We certainly benefited
A lot of technology conferences are celebratory in nature. They showcase new products, highlight customer successes and provide a platform for authors, analysts and industry experts to praise these accomplishments. To be sure, there was plenty to celebrate at the SAS Global Forum Executive Conference. But this year’s conference -
Dave Thomas interviews SAS CMO Jim Davis at SAS Global Forum 2010 in Seattle. Davis talks about the launch of SAS Social Media Analytics and the apparently awakening over analytics even in a tough economy. Web Links:YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZgSLLIkAgE SAS.com:http://www.sas.com/apps/webnet/SGF2010VideoBlog/index.html?videoID=isgf10episode12
SAS CEO Jim Goodnight talks about SAS' new offerings in High Performance Computing and Social Network Analysis, price changes for SAS OnDemand for Education and this year's SAS Global Forum conference in Seattle. Web Links:YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBdv5ofvaGk SAS.com:http://www.sas.com/apps/webnet/SGF2010VideoBlog/index.html?videoID=isgf10episode11
Jean Balent gave a quick 20-minute presentation of her ideas that may help programmers become more organized and therefore more productive. The presentation is a shortened version of her paper, How to become an organized SAS programmer. In fact, her tips may be useful in other areas of your career.
In one area of the Convention Center, writing on the wall is actually encouraged. The Innovation Wall, a giant semi-circular display in the Demo Area, shows a timeline of SAS innovations on one side with open space on the other for attendees to write about how they’ve innovated with SAS.
From agriculture to wholesale, 29 industries were represented at SAS Global Forum 2010. Which industry was the most well-represented? Here's a breakdown of the top ten by percentage of attendees: 1. Government (13%) 2. Education (12%) 3. Healthcare insurance (10%) 4. Pharma (9%) 5. Consulting and systems integration (8%) 6.
The Spring 2010 issue of Foresight is now available. Here is Editor Len Tashman’s preview: What’s the connection between hindsight and foresight? That is the question Paul Goodwin asks in his Hot New Research column leading off this issue. The problem is that hindsight bias – the tendency to believe