College graduates are eager to switch the tassel from student to professional, but a career for young professionals today requires more than a place to use their skills and pay the bills. Pauline Ashcraft, a Senior Associate Business Operations Specialist for SAS, knows what it means to find a career
Although I do not typically blog about undocumented SAS options, I'll make an exception this time. For many years, I have known that the CONTENTS and COMPARE procedures support the BRIEF and SHORT options, but I always forget which option goes with which procedure. For the record, here are the
The machine learning autogenerated concept and fact rules in VTA 8.4 facilitate the process of developing LITI rules to extract and find information in text documents. There are many important problems where the use of Text Analytics provides valuable insights such as with Human Trafficking.
Forming a significant theme in several organisational technology strategies, AI can augment a gamut of business practices, including compliance. Compliance is a must-do activity, not a nice-to-have. It is essential that companies extract maximum value from compliance processes, reducing the possibility of it being considered a cost centre. Technological innovation
Put simply, data literacy is the ability to derive meaning from data. That seems like a straightforward proposition, but, in truth, finding relationships in data can be fraught with complexities, including: Understanding where the data came from, including the lineage or source of that data. Ensuring that the data meet compliance
Anyone who might have stumbled across my previous musings will already know that I am a great fan of studying the history of technology and its evolution. And where we might indeed be in the not too distant future. I’m of course a proper sci-fi nut, avid (and my wife
Could data governance policies for analytics be the foundation for a model governance program?
One of the features of SAS Grid Manager (and SAS Grid Manager for Platform) introduced in SAS 9.4 M6 is the capability for the grid provider software to handle open-source workloads in addition to traditional SAS jobs. In this post, we’ll take a look at the steps required to get your SAS Grid Manager environment set up to utilize this functionality, and we’ll demonstrate the process of submitting Python code for execution in the SAS Grid.
The world of sports has been deploying analytics to improve both fan engagement and athlete performance. The Hungarian State Lottery believes there is a third use case – to improve engagement with gamers. Which is why the organisation has partnered with SAS on the upcoming Hungarian Hackathon. The lottery's online
In a scatter plot that displays many points, it can be important to visualize the density of the points. Scatter plots (indeed, all plots that show individual markers) can suffer from overplotting, which means that the graph does not indicate how many observations are at a specific (x, y) location.
One of the most common questions I encounter in my work is some variation of “How can I make Mom/Dad/Grandma/Grandpa take better care of themselves, realize they need to move to long term care, stop driving", ... you get the picture.
Customer identity is a precious asset and a highly prized commodity. As the financial services industry has become more digitised down the years, customers' digital identity decides what they can do and what online services they have access to. This has been revolutionary for the customer experience. So long as
North Carolina is one of those key "swing states" that might possibly decide a national presidential election. And with such an election coming up next year (2020), I thought I would have a look at the voter registration data to see how it has changed since the previous presidential election
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, life can surprise you in a big way, making you wonder what else you've missed. That is what happened when I recently had a chance to work with the SAS® Scalable Performance Data Server, a product that's been around a while, but
Around the world, combating public sector fraud is a major problem. "Benefits cheats" get the most media attention, but are by no means the biggest loss. Tax fraud is also a huge issue. And some estimates suggest that procurement fraud could dwarf both in terms of both scale and complexity.
At SAS, our values influence everything we do, from the software we create to how we interact with the communities around us. They also inspire our employees to be curious and think outside the box – and our own Tim Wilson, Director of Patents, is no exception! He’s a lawyer,
A moving average is a statistical technique that is used to smooth a time series. My colleague, Cindy Wang, wrote an article about the Hull moving average (HMA), which is a time series smoother that is sometimes used as a technical indicator by stock market traders. Cindy showed how to
Time-series decomposition is an important technique for time series analysis, especially for seasonal adjustment and trend strength measurement. Decomposition deconstructs a time series into several components, with each representing a certain pattern or characteristic. This post shows you how to use SAS® Visual Analytics to visually show the decomposition of
Earlier this year I was lucky enough to attend the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition with my colleague Alan McGlinn at the RDS in Dublin. If you’re in Dublin in January, I thoroughly recommend a visit. The event is vast, and I was humbled by the level of expertise,
The SAS Forecasting R&D team has an open position for a Forecasting and Machine Learning Specialist (apply here). What you’ll do As a Forecasting and Machine Learning Specialist on the SAS Forecasting R&D team, you will help create innovative software to apply cutting-edge statistical methods to automated enterprise-scale business forecasting processes. You will:
How do we make the world a better place? It’s a question that’s tickled many a worthy brain over the centuries – and now the answer is closer than ever. Data can make the world a better place. Data is why we don’t live in caves anymore, why we moved
Yesterday we had a 'special election' here in NC, to elect new members to the House of Representatives for Congressional Districts 3 and 9. The election got a lot of national news coverage, therefore I thought people might like seeing the results plotted on a map. Before I decided to
前回は、ビジネス価値創出につながる「オペレーショナル・アナリティクス for Data Scientist」ユースケースの論文を紹介しました。今回は、企業様にとって、クラウド上のインフラアーキテクチャと分析プラットフォームのデプロイメントについて、ご紹介します。昨今、なぜ「コンテナ」が注目されているのか、そして、クラウドやコンテナ上に分析プラットフォームを移行/構築し、活用することに関心があるのであれば、ぜひ最後までご覧ください。 1．Cows or Chickens: How You Can Make Your Models into Containers モデルは特定の作業（新しいデータをスコアリングして予測を出すこと）として役割を果たしてきています。一方、コンテナは簡単に作成し、廃棄し、再利用できることができます。実際、それらは簡単にインテグレートさせ、パブリッククラウドとオンプレミス環境で実行できます。SASユーザは本論文を通じて、簡単にモデルの機能をコンテナに入れることができます。例えば、パブリッククラウドとオンプレミス環境でのDockerコンテナ。また、SASのModel Managerは様々なソース（オープンソース、SAS、コンテナ等々）からモデルの管理を行うことができます。したがって、この論文はそれらの基本知識と、どのようにSASの分析モデルをコンテナに入れることをメインに紹介します。 2．Orchestration of SAS® Data Integration Processes on AWS この論文では、Amazon Web Services（AWS）S3でのSASデータインテグレーションプロセスの構成について説明します。例としては、現在サポートしているお客様がクレジット報告書を生成するプロセスを毎日実行しています。そして、そのお客様の対象顧客は1カ月ごとに1回その報告を受け取ります。データ量としては、毎日に約20万の顧客情報が処理され、最終的に毎月約600万人の顧客へ報告することとなります。プロセスはオンプレミスデータセンターで始まり、続いてAWSのSASデータインテグレーションでAPR計算が行われ、最後にオンプレミスデータセンターで報告書が生成されます。さらに詳しい情報としては、彼らのアーキテクチャ全体はマイクロサービスを使われていますが、同時にAWS Lambda、簡易通知サービス（SNS）、Amazon Simple Storage Service（Amazon S3）、およびAmazon Elastic Compute Cloud（EC2）などの独立した高度に分離されたコンポーネントも使われています。つまり、それらにより、データパイプラインに対するトラブルシューティングが簡単になっていますが、オーケストレーションにLambda関数を使用することを選択すると、プロセスがある程度複雑になります。ただし、エンタープライズアーキテクチャにとって最も安定性、セキュリティ、柔軟性、および信頼性もあります。S3FやCloudWatch SSMのようなより単純な代替手段がありますが、それらはエンタープライズアーキテクチャにはあまり適していません。 ３．SAS® on Kubernetes: Container Orchestration of Analytic Work Loads 現在、Big Dataの時代で、Advanced analyticsのためのインフラストラクチャに対するニーズが高まっています。また、分析自体に対して、最適化、予測が最も重要領域であり、小売業、金融業などの業界ではそれぞれ、分析に対する独自の課題を抱えています。この論文では、Google Cloud
If you sometimes sneak in a quick dinner while driving your kids to practice or a hold a sandwich in your left hand while typing the last few lines of your project with your right, then you are no stranger to distracted eating. Or maybe the big surprise ending to
Taking a decision is easy. However, living with the outcome might be problematic because every decision is a choice that leads us to an action that will affect others. And trust – what about this elemental human feeling? As children, we trust our parents. This kind of trust forms the
I often use axis tables in PROC SGPLOT in SAS to add a table of text to a graph so that the table values are aligned with the data. But axis tables are not the only way to display tabular data in a graph. You can also use the TEXT
I recently had the incredible opportunity to attend SAS Global Forum in Dallas as a presenter and New SAS Professional Award recipient. At the conference, I was able to learn more about SAS features and applications, share my knowledge of SAS applications in the clinical trials space, and make new
Sibos 2019 kicks off in London in three weeks, and the theme for this year is "Thriving in a hyper-connected world." The market has long demanded quicker and more convenient payment methods, and the industry is now answering with ubiquitous payments. Yet at what cost? PSD2 and open banking are
SASPy is a powerful Python library that interfaces with SAS and can help with your machine-learning solutions. SASPy was created for Python programmers to leverage the power of SAS within their Python scripts. If you are not familiar with SASPy, see the following resources: Introducing SASPy: Use Python code to
If you consume NBA content through social media, then you know just how active that online community is. Basketball arguments and ‘hot takes’ on the Internet are about as commonplace as Michael Jordan playing golf instead of running a functional NBA front office. I wondered if NBA fans happened to
