In evolutionary biology there is an interesting concept called “punctuated equilibria,” which is used primarily to explain why the fossil record seems to abruptly change after long periods of apparent calm, or ‘stasis’ as it is called. To understand this better, think of a stairway where the length between each
I recently gave a talk to a group of engineering students at Duke University, located just down the road from our headquarters in North Carolina. A couple of days later, one of the students sent me an email asking a very good question: which skills should I build up to
My name is Tonya, and I’m a Statistician. It’s true. I’ve been one for almost 20 years now. I was crunching numbers and analyzing data long before statistician landed on the sexiest profession list. And now, it seems like that claim to fame has faded in the face of an
I can’t believe all that has happened in the 7 months since I last blogged about high-performance analytics, so I’m back to give you some updates from SAS R&D. The energy around this area keeps growing as more of our developers adopt the new high-performance architecture and target their developments
At Predictive Analytics World San Francisco this week I attended back to back sessions on econometrics, a word that doesn’t surface as often as I think it should. Bestselling books like Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything or Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our
My colleague Geoffrey Taylor recently wrote about the education and training of analytic resources and the potential shortage of these resources in the job market. My other colleague Russ Cobb addressed building an analytical workforce in his recent entry. What’s on my mind is what happens when you finally find
Happy New Year! Wishing everyone a prosperous and joyful 2012! The joyful festive atmosphere continues to pervade most Chinese families in Asia in the coming week, as we will be celebrating Lunar New Year (Spring Festival) on Jan 23rd . This date is determined by the lunisolar Chinese calendar. Alongside
It's true. "Big data" can be a problem and an opportunity. Many organizations have struggled to manage, much less profit from, the deluge. In 2012, look for big data to spur demand for big data analytics. New developments in high-performance computing as well as increased demand for visualization and text
Big data has been a hot topic recently, but more often than not the topic is covered from an IT perspective. What do the analysts, data miners and statisticians think? I recall the old days discussing with statisticians what data mining is and how it fundamentally differs from statistics. In
As the Basel Accords continue to drum up attention in the global financial markets, many institutions are looking at how they can strike a balance between capital requirements and competitive advantage. One area of focus is consumer credit risk modelling and scoring, as the more accurate and robust the models
