I hope you will join me (and over 20,000 of my closest friends) on Tuesday June 16, for the complimentary Virtual SAS Global Forum 2020. The SAS event team has put together an impressive program of live and recorded content. You can create your own virtual experience, selecting from multiple
A message from the Work/Life Center: We are getting many requests from employees asking what they can do to challenge racism and to support their Black coworkers. We love that we work for a company with this level of concern. In our last blog post we shared some thoughts on context as
Whether you enjoy debugging or hate it, for programmers, debugging is a fact of life. It’s easy to misspell a keyword, scramble your array subscripts, or (heaven forbid!) forget a semicolon. That’s why we include a chapter on debugging in The Little SAS® Book and its companion book, Exercises and
Rapid demand response forecasting techniques are forecasting processes that can incorporate key information quickly enough to act upon in real time by agile supply chains. Retailers and consumer goods suppliers are urgently trying to determine how changes in consumer behavior will affect their regions, channels, categories, brands and products during
Let’s face it. Change is tough. Right now, we’re in a state of constant change where routines are disrupted and uncertainty looms. Stress levels are high, and juggling a new remote-work-life schedule (that may include roles of employee, parent, teacher, chef, caregiver, etc.) continues to be a big adjustment from
I think that this pandemic has put digital transformation at the top of every executive agenda.
Why all the fuss about hydration? H2O helps regulate body temperature, transports nutrients throughout the body and cushions joints. Not only that, but it is essential for flushing waste products and toxins from the body. Environmental pollutants, household chemicals, alcohol, medications and end products from your body’s natural chemical reactions
What do two health systems, 4000 miles apart (6600 kilometers) have in common in their COVID-19 response? Despite different policy responses to the pandemic, they are more alike than you might think. Brought together by SAS and the FutureNHS COVID-19 analytics huddle, these two health systems recently shared their experience
Procurement fraud is, to put it simply, huge. An estimate by PwC a few years ago suggested that it was one of the most common economic crimes around the world. That estimate has not changed. What’s more, few companies have taken steps to address the problem. “Procurement fraud is notoriously
This article introduces the iml action, which is available in SAS Viya 3.5. The iml action supports most of the same syntax and functionality as the SAS/IML matrix language, which is implemented in PROC IML. With minimal changes, most programs that run in PROC IML also run in the iml
June is PRIDE month. Even before I joined the leadership team for the SAS PRIDE Employee Inclusion Group, I always used my Work/Life blog in June to write about LGBTQ youth and how we can support them. This year I struggle to find words that are adequate to educate,
Learn the nuts and bolts of how to measure data quality from expert Jim Harris.
Critics of sports analytics (and there are some entertaining ones) love to point out that analytics isn’t capable of capturing the things that don’t show up on a box score. A player who dives on the floor to save a loose ball, a quarterback strategically misleading a defender to free
Written by Allison Hines and Kara Roberts Over the last few weeks, we've shared stories of how SAS employees are banding together while staying apart during the COVID-19 crisis. Our people have donated their time and skills to the cause, including making masks for healthcare workers, leading virtual dance classes for students with special needs and hosting trivia games for charity via Zoom – among many other efforts. Keep reading
A SAS customer asked how to specify interaction effects between a classification variable and a spline effect in a SAS regression procedure. There are at least two ways to do this. If the SAS procedure supports the EFFECT statement, you can build the interaction term in the MODEL statement. For
In the second of a three-part series of posts, SAS' Funda Gunes and her colleague Ricky Tharrington summarize model-agnostic model interpretability in SAS Viya.
Intelligent decisioning can help telcos survive the retail shutdown by accelerating the shift to digital channels
AI has huge potential to help us understand and manage our world, and especially to get value from the enormous amount of data that we now generate.
A monotonic relationship exists when a model’s output increases or stays constant in step with an increase in your model’s inputs. Relationships can be monotonically increasing or decreasing with the distinction based on which direction the input and output travel. A common example is in credit risk where you would expect someone’s risk score to increase with the amount of debt they have relative to their income.
Learning never stops. When SAS had to change this year’s SAS Global Forum (SASGF) to a virtual event, everyone was disappointed. I am, however, super excited about all of the papers and stream of video releases over the last month (and I encourage you to register for the upcoming live
According to Gartner only 50% of clever AI models ever get deployed, put into practise and used to make decisions.
I recently read an article that describes ways to compute confidence intervals for the difference in a percentile between two groups. In Eaton, Moore, and MacKenzie (2019), the authors describe a problem in hydrology. The data are the sizes of pebbles (grains) in rivers at two different sites. The authors
In natural language processing, word vectors play a key role in making technologies such as machine translation and speech recognition possible. Let's talk about how to transform word vector tables from long to wide in SAS, so we can potentially get sentence vectors to process further.
In many countries, retail has been right at the centre of the coronavirus storm. Some retailers – those selling essential goods – have been unable or barely able to keep up with demand. Other sectors, notably clothes and luxury goods, have seen a complete drop-off in demand. Some retailers have
I wish I had a magic wand! The pandemic would disappear. I’d be back on the SAS campus meeting with folks face-to-face [with a fresh haircut & color] and enjoying the great café food. And I would have plenty of ideas and suggestions to point your teens to for their summer
When the technology is deeply embedded into the curriculum, we sometimes describe the resulting programmes as creating an ‘analytics skills factory’.
“He spends a lot of time wandering around in circles in the backyard,” my wife said to someone on the telephone. That’s true. Our backyard is only about 1/8th of an acre and I have taken to wandering outside and walking around the fence line. Ostensibly, I am checking to
In a previous article, I discussed the definition of the Kullback-Leibler (K-L) divergence between two discrete probability distributions. For completeness, this article shows how to compute the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two continuous distributions. When f and g are discrete distributions, the K-L divergence is the sum of f(x)*log(f(x)/g(x)) over all
While working at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, I had access to data on over ten million visits to emergency departments in central New Jersey, including ICD-9 (International Classification of Disease – 9th edition) codes along with some patient demographic data. I also had the ozone level from
Fraud prevention: Collaboration is one of the traits we have utilized to maximum effect in pretty much everything.
