When my colleague, Robert Allison, blogged about visualizing the Mandelbrot set, I was reminded of a story from the 1980s, which was the height of the fractal craze. A research group in computational mathematics had been awarded a multimillion-dollar grant to purchase a supercomputer. When the supercomputer arrived and got
In a previous post, Zero to SAS in 60 Seconds- SAS Machine Learning on SAS Cloud, I documented my experience with a SAS free trial on the SAS Cloud. Well, the engineers at SAS have been busy and created another free trial. The new trial covers SAS Event Stream Processing
In July 1984 I was a public health nurse assigned to Willow Spring, Holly Springs and Fuquay, bustling between three public schools, home health visits, and a clinic on Fuquay Avenue that shared space with the local DMV office—a small white frame house divided in half to provide two essential
The range of potential payment services has expanded rapidly over the last few years. Increasingly, we all want the flexibility of being able to pay with new payment methods, from contactless through to Apple Pay, mobile wallets and beyond. Digital natives, such as millennials, don’t just want this – they
Have you ever had one of those moments when something you had assumed was true all your life, turned out not to be true? I remember that happening in my high school Spanish class (taught by the wonderful Señor Shoaf), when he let us in on a little secret -
How we built a recommendation engine for new topics on communities.sas.com. We used data, machine learning, and DevOps to build a scoring engine with SAS.
Years ago I saw a line of SAS code that was really puzzling. It was a statement that started with: if 0 then … ; What? This was a statement that would always be evaluated as false. Why would anyone write such a statement? Recently, I was discussing with a
How do you explain flat-line forecasts to senior management? Or, do you just make manual overrides to adjust the forecast? When there is no detectable trend or seasonality associated with your demand history, or something has disrupted the trend and/or seasonality, simple time series methods (i.e. naïve and simple
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 National Intern Day presents a unique opportunity to celebrate the unique value interns
In the previous blog, The Endocannabinoid System, I reviewed how the endocannabinoid system (ECS) works, what it affects and a few ways to optimize how it functions. The use of exogenous cannabinoids like CBD is one way to change how your ECS is working, and it’s a hot topic right
SAS supports more than 25 common probability distributions for the PDF, CDF, QUANTILE, and RAND functions. Of course, there are infinitely many distributions, so not every possible distribution is supported. If you need a less-common distribution, I've shown how to extend the functionality of Base SAS (by using PROC FCMP)
I recently hosted a Digital Dial-Back Challenge. For two weeks participants chose a form of technology they wanted to assess and potentially reduce their use of. This was not a detox. Instead, by creating a plan including strategies and "alternative actions", participants found increased opportunities to be aware of their
If you're curious what makes SAS a great workplace, one answer always rises to the top - our people. It's no secret that the people who work here are some of the best and brightest - not to mention the most passionate, accountable, authentic and curious people you'll ever meet. And at SAS, Your
Without the right data, any analytics initiative is just an illusion. For machine and deep learning efforts, new sources of data are always in demand. In a few of our Innovation at Scale study interviews, respondents pointed to the rising need for data hunters. I asked our resident guru on
Guest blogger Khari Villela shares tips to help you skip common pitfalls of building a data lake.
The guys over at reservations.com recently posted a really interesting idea, and a map to go along with it! They worked out an itinerary where you could spend one year traveling around the world (staying in a different place each week), and always be in a comfortable temperature around 70-75°
Is 4 an extreme value for the standard normal distribution? In high school, students learn the famous 68-95-99.7 rule, which is a way to remember that 99.7 percent of random observation from a normal distribution are within three standard deviations from the mean. For the standard normal distribution, the probability
About four weeks ago i attended the ISF forecasting conference in Thessaloniki for the first time. It was a great conference with a lot of focus on forecasting methods. This year one of the hot topics was how to use machine learning in forecasting. One of the key questions was
The RANK procedure (PROC RANK) is useful for ranking numeric variables in a data set across observations. You often see PROC RANK used to rank data into quartiles, deciles, or percentiles. This action requires that you use the GROUPS= option in the PROC RANK statement. This blog answers three questions
When a new Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, the Moon can cast a shadow on certain regions of the Earth. This natural phenomenon creates a solar eclipse, meaning the Moon covers, or eclipses, your view of the Sun if you're in that region. No surprise that in
A few years ago Mandelbrot sets and fractals were all the rage! (Am I showing my age? Hahaha!) I thought creating some plots of this type of data would be a good way to sharpen my SAS programming skills, and it would make a nice/interesting example to help teach people
Building a predictive model is generally not the end of the project. Indeed, there is a major difference between building a model and actually getting it ready for people to use in their products and services. Even if the purpose of the model is to increase knowledge of the data,
A cup of dark roast coffee, sunrise porch time, fresh sheets, a garden tomato, the smell of a new book, a glass of red fireside.....These are a few of my favorite things. All so simple, yet they bring me so much joy. Henry David Thoreau author, naturalist, philosopher, was born
Have you ever tried to pass comma-delimited values to SAS macro or to a SAS macro function? How can SAS distinguish commas separating parameters or arguments from commas separating parts of the values? Passing comma-delimited value as an argument to a SAS macro function Let’s say you want to extract
Organisations across the globe are caught in the midst of a digital revolution – one that has sent shockwaves rippling through every industry. Business leaders recognise the scale and pace of change: 68 per cent of executives surveyed by Accenture say that they expect their industry to be significantly disrupted
In the SAS/IML language, a matrix contains data of one type: numeric or character. If you want to create a SAS data set that contains mixed-type data (numeric and character), SAS/IML 15.1 provides support to write multiple matrices to a data set by using a single statement. Specifically, the CREATE
“Sharon” is overwhelmed by caring for her parents: both of their caregiving needs are increasing, she is weary from lack of sleep and fearful that her own health is in jeopardy. Her siblings live out of the area and seem unable to help. In addition to caring for her parents,
Last month I wrote a blog about sibling rivalry in caregiving which began with the following thoughts: 'As we are all well aware, providing caregiving for our parent(s) is complicated and messy. Siblings can often be both a blessing and a curse in this process, providing much needed relief and
As we are all well aware, providing caregiving for our parent(s) is complicated and messy. Siblings can often be both a blessing and a curse in this process, providing much needed relief and support, or perhaps creating additional stress and barriers to important decisions and resources. Why is this the
“They were the best of asteroids, they were the worst of asteroids.” ~ Charles Dickens Armstrong There are good asteroids, and there are bad asteroids. Good asteroids stay in their own neighborhoods and wait for us to come visit them. Bad asteroids, however, don’t wait for an invitation – they
