Graphing data is almost always more informative than displaying a table of summary statistics. In a recent article about "dynamite plots," I briefly mentioned that graphs such as box plots and strip plots are better at showing data than graphs that merely show the mean and standard deviation. This article
Tropical Storm Ana, which formed in May this year, officially made 2021 the seventh consecutive year that a storm formed before the season's designated start. Since then we have seen a number of storms, representative of an increase of severe weather over the past few years, especially as we remember
“Bias is not inhuman. To have bias is absolutely human,” says Banu Raghuraman. If data enthusiasts are going to break the cycle of bias, however, “we have to be more aware of where the data is coming from, what it’s trying to tell us and how we can break the
In my previous post CAS-Action! Simply Distinct - Part 1 I reviewed using the simple.distinct CAS action to explore distinct and missing values in a distributed CAS table. Welcome back to my SAS Users blog series CAS Action! - a series on fundamentals. I've broken the series into logical, consumable
Data should alleviate strain instead of causing new pain Recent research from SAS and Accenture underlines what many of us already knew anecdotally. Marketers are increasingly frustrated by their inability to obtain and leverage insights into customer behavior. Marketing teams have data – heaps of data – but they are unable
Word embeddings are the learned representations of words within a set of documents. Each word or term is represented as a real-valued vector within a vector space. Terms or words that reside closer to each other within that vector space are expected to share similar meanings. Thus, embeddings try to capture the meaning of each word or term through its relationships with the other words in the corpus.
“What’s for dinner tonight?” The absolute LAST thing anyone wants to think about after an exhausting day of mind-numbing meetings, traffic jams, juggling kids between after-school activities and tackling homework. So how do you avoid this situation? Meal planning of course…probably the next to last thing anyone wants to think
Written by Valeria Ravani Since the pandemic began, travel has been restricted to help curb the spread of COVID-19. We’re all eager for the days when we can travel again – for work, or for pleasure! Until that time comes, we’re going to take you on a virtual world tour,
The field of probability and statistics is full of asymptotic results. The Law of Large Numbers and the Central Limit Theorem are two famous examples. An asymptotic result can be both a blessing and a curse. For example, consider a result that says that the distribution of some statistic converges
The term "fuzzy matching" describes a method of comparing two strings that might have slight differences, such as misspelling or a middle initial in a name included or not included. One of my favorite functions to compare the "closeness" of two strings is the SPEDIS (spelling distance) function. Have you
Actuarial practice has always been analytical—so how much is advanced analytics disrupting this element of insurance? We discussed this issue in a recent #SASchat. The importance of competitive pricing Analytics is now being used in more and more areas in insurance, and particularly to tailor pricing more precisely to customers’
A recent report suggests that the current state of climate change is alarming. Climate change puts billions of people at risk of events like extreme hurricane seasons and rising sea levels. However, data and analytics play a critical role in informing us about the situation, planning ahead, and raising awareness
The SAS/IML language supports lists, which are containers that store other objects, such as matrices and other lists. A primary use of lists is to pack objects of various types into a single symbol that can be passed to and from modules. A useful feature of using lists is that
Earth’s natural capital deserves protection – for our sake and for the future. Analytics can help.
In this Q&A with MIT/SMR Connections, Iain Brown, SAS’s head of data science for the United Kingdom and Ireland, discusses technical readiness for AI, customer adoption trends, IT’s changing role, and mission-critical considerations for technology and talent. Q: What does it mean, from both a technology and a cultural standpoint,
I’m a Leo and love the sun and the sea! There is something magical about the ocean breeze, the sand between my toes and the glistening sun on the ocean waves as they easily flow in and out in a rhythmic, calm manner. I imagine the seaweed beneath the water’s
Welcome back to my SAS Users blog series CAS Action! - a series on fundamentals. I've broken the series into logical, consumable parts. If you'd like to start by learning a little more about what CAS Actions are, please see CAS Actions and Action Sets - a brief intro. Or
I previously wrote about one way to solve the partition problem in SAS. In the partition problem, you divide (or partition) a set of N items into two groups of size k and N-k such that the sum of the items' weights is the same in each group. For example,
As organizations increasingly use artificial intelligence to collect and analyze data and identify individuals, the topic of ethical AI often rears its head. Last year, Michigan's Integrated Data Automated System flagged more than 540,000 unemployment claims as possibly fraudulent. Thousands of state residents’ accounts were inaccurately flagged, making it almost
Across many parts of the globe, the fall brings cooler temperatures, lower humidity, pumpkin spice lattes, and, here in the U.S., my personal favorite, the return of college football! The beginning of fall also marks the start of Fall Prevention Awareness Week. Here's what you should know to help prevent
The Day of the Programmer is not enough time to celebrate our favorite code-creators. That’s why at SAS, we celebrate an entire week with SAS Programmer Week! If you want to extend the fun and learning of SAS Programmer Week year-round, SAS Press is here to support you with books
The partition problem has many variations, but recently I encountered it as an interactive puzzle on a computer. (Try a similar game yourself!) The player is presented with an old-fashioned pan-balance scale and a set of objects of different weights. The challenge is to divide (or partition) the objects into
SAS Analytics Pro is an easy-to-use, yet powerful package for accessing, manipulating, analyzing and presenting information. It lets organizations improve productivity with all the tools and methods needed for desktop data analysis – in one package.
The International Institute of Forecasters and SAS® are funding two $10,000 grants to support research on forecasting. Per the announcement: For the eighteenth year, the IIF, in collaboration with SAS®, is proud to announce financial support for research on improving forecasting methods and business forecasting practice. The award for this year will be
In an episode of The Health Pulse hosted by Greg Horne, we learn about Dawnté Early, PhD, whose idea and mission is to transform the mental health system so that everyone who needs care receives high-quality and culturally competent care. Early's work focuses on bringing together individual mental health data
A statistical programmer asked how to simulate event-trials data for groups. The subjects in each group have a different probability of experiencing the event. This article describes one way to simulate this scenario. The simulation is similar to simulating from a mixture distribution. This article also shows three different ways
The need for agile, accurate demand planning has never been greater. When considering migrating your demand management application to a cloud-native solution, you might experience platform management challenges ranging from lacking the resources needed to oversee application operations, to manipulating maintenance tasks that may distract from growing the business. Why
As a species, our bodies are hard wired to love sweet! This came in handy back when we were roaming the earth trying to stay alive and figuring out what we could eat. Sweet usually meant safe, but unless you came upon a beehive full of honey or found some
Jim Harris takes a deep dive into data lakes and how they relate to the cloud.
Catching up to the consumers Using technology and analytics to support marketing is not especially new. It is fair to say that it has been possible for some time. Many organisations have invested in marketing platforms, for example. However, there is a niggling problem. The investment may have been made, but few marketers are
