Excerpt adapted from Steve Morlidge's new book Present Sense (Matador, 2019). Part 2: Not Storytellers But Reporters News and Evidence If we ever doubted the importance of having a capability to assimilate mountains of detail, synthesize it and present it in an accessible and balanced way, the storm around the
It's no secret that The BFD is a huge fan of Steve Morlidge. Morlidge has contributed work of fundamental importance to our understanding of the practice of business forecasting. His studies of forecast quality exposed the abysmal nature of the practice, including the startling statistic that perhaps 30-50% of real-life
I recently showed how to use simulation to estimate the power of a statistical hypothesis test. The example (a two-sample t test for the difference of means) is a simple SAS/IML module that is very fast. Fast is good because often you want to perform a sequence of simulations over
The International Institute of Forecasters and SAS® announce two $10,000 grants to support research on forecasting. Per the announcement: Forecasting research has seen major changes in the theoretical ideas underpinning forecasting effectiveness over the last 30 years. However, there has been less impact on forecasting practice. We aim to put this right.
Lisa Lucas explains why people, knowledge and tech are vital for contact tracing.
Could you pass a test on coronavirus testing terms? Jim Harris can help.
Bone broth has been around for centuries, it’s the traditional way to make soup or stew. It just seems like a new thing since many of us don’t tend to make soups or broths from scratch anymore. It has become popular due to its supposed healing properties as well.
As he watched me unpack yet another Amazon delivery, my husband decided to do an intervention. Scattered around me on the floor were solar panels, water purification tablets, tarps, hunting knives and enough batteries to power New York City for many weeks. It was 2019 and hurricane season was upon
SAS' Leonid Batkhan reveals how to change lengths for all character variables in a data set and all data sets in a data library to facilitate data migration to Unicode encoding environment.
A previous article about standardizing data in groups shows how to simulate data from two groups. One sample (with n1=20 observations) is simulated from an N(15, 5) distribution whereas a second (with n2=30 observations) is simulated from an N(16, 5) distribution. The sample means of the two groups are close
As we saw in the last installment, The Confidence Man works by making every assertion -- no matter how ridiculous, heinous, or false -- with extreme confidence. By following this practice, with never a waver or inkling of self-doubt, roughly 40% of people will follow along in adoration. If you
Hidden Markov Models Introduction Statistical models of hidden Markov modeling (HMM) have become increasingly popular in the last several years. The models are very rich in mathematical structures and can form the theoretical basis of many real applications. In the classical continuous/discrete Markov process, each state corresponds to an observed
The most fundamental concept that students learning introductory SAS programming must master is how SAS handles data. This might seem like an obvious statement, but it is often overlooked by students in their rush to produce code that works. I often tell my class to step back for a moment
Katherine Taylor explains how and why new data improves risk models.
A common operation in statistical data analysis is to center and scale a numerical variable. This operation is conceptually easy: you subtract the mean of the variable and divide by the variable's standard deviation. Recently, I wanted to perform a slight variation of the usual standardization: Perform a different standardization
Identification of Concepts and Topics based on out-of-the-box rules. It is common practice to develop a business or industry specific taxonomy.
An embedding model is a way to reduce the dimensionality of input data, such as images. Consider this to be a type of data preparation applied to image analysis. When an embedding model is used, input images are converted into low-dimensional vectors that can be more easily used by other computer vision tasks. The key to good embedding is to train the model so that similar images are converted to similar vectors.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the issue of tax administration was low on the agenda for most. Beyond the obvious public health concerns, most business and government leaders were focused on how best to keep businesses afloat. But for those in federal, state and local governments responsible
Data collected during the manufacturing process is used to try to identify the cause of discrete problems after the event.
Have you ever seen the "brain teaser" for children that shows a 4 x 4 grid and asks "how many squares of any size are in this grid?" To solve this problem, the reader must recognize that there are sixteen 1 x 1 squares, nine 2 x 2 squares, four 3 x 3 squares, and one 4 x 4 square.
In this guest blogpost, Work/Life welcomes Jamie Pack, College Planning Consultant with Advantage College Planning, to help parents and students sort through the issue of declaring a major…or not…during the college application process. Is there any value in applying to college without a declared major? Yes! In a time where
The iml action was introduced in Viya 3.5. As shown in a previous article, the iml action supports ways to implement the map-reduce paradigm, which is a way to distribute a computation by using multiple threads. The map-reduce paradigm is ideal for “embarrassingly parallel” computations, which are composed of many
I spoke with Antonie Berkel and Dr. Joost Huiskens about a systems analysis project for the design of a clinical decision support system (CDSS) which integrates computer vision to help radiologists monitor the progression of tumors.
Let's learn how to prompt for a date range in a SAS Visual Analytics report using control objects such as sliders, drop-down lists, and text input.
You want to use an API to retrieve data and process it with SAS. How do you do it? PROC HTTP offers the features of the cURL command within your SAS code.
How can organizations be more resilient during an uncertain business and public health situation? Lessons learned from organizations at the front lines of crisis response reinforce the importance of good analytic governance. These leading organizations have shown us that the fundamentals of the analytic life cycle – data, discovery and
It’s National Intern Day! Created by WayUp, National Intern Day is a holiday dedicated to recognizing and celebrating the future leaders of the world: Interns. At SAS, we feel like every day should be Intern Day, but #NationalnternDay presents a unique opportunity to celebrate the value interns bring to our company. This
SAS instructor Raymond Thomas touts the benefits of Report Center, part of SAS Environment Manager Extended Monitoring.
When you write a program that simulates data from a statistical model, you should always check that the simulation code is correct. One way to do this is to generate a large simulated sample, estimate the parameters in the simulated data, and make sure that the estimates are close to
Each of us has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in a myriad of ways. In March we dove deep, headfirst, into a number of emotions and a new way of life that is ever-evolving. Some people may find they are drinking more in one night or more days of
