Last Christmas I decided to knit a scarf while at a concert in the Bahamas. A little boy and his sister sitting in front of me watched me very intently. Their eyes grew bigger and bigger as the scarf grew longer and longer. Finally the little boy couldn’t take it
While holed up inside, like many others on the East Coast of the United States, suffering from record-breaking rainfall and watching the path of Hurricane Joaquin, I found a perfect metaphor for handling a problem in explaining analytics. Many executives bemoan the fact that it seems to take forever for
In October I will be at the Analytics 2015 conference in Las Vegas. I’ve never been to Las Vegas before. People tell me that if you are better than average in forecasting where a small ball will end up after it’s been spinning for a while in a dish with
Do you want to know what will happen in the future? To gain true predictive insight, skip the tea leaves and look toward your data. SAS instructor Jeff Thompson is a high-energy data mining expert who will be demonstrating how to gain predictive insight from your data in his new
Among the tightly held cards, piles of chips and bright lights, there have been stories that have unfolded in Las Vegas that have been forever preserved in time, never seeing the light of day. But what if what happened in Vegas…could be shared with excitement with your friends and family?
Suppose you wish to select a random sample from a large SAS dataset. No problem. The PROC SURVEYSELECT step below randomly selects a 2 percent sample: proc surveyselect data=large out=sample method=srs /* simple random sample */ n=1000000; /* sample size */ run; Do you have a SAS/STAT license? If not,
The digital disruption phenomenon is redrawing the market map. New players, products and services are gaining competitive advantage, while traditional business and revenue models are being questioned. Gartner believes that by 2020, thanks to the Internet of Things, information will be used to reinvent, digitalize or eliminate 80% of business
The 2015 United States Tennis Open tournament is now underway, and like most tennis fans, I’ve got my eyes on women’s tennis great Serena Williams, as she attempts to make history by winning the tournament and achieving a calendar Grand Slam. What are her chances of reaching the milestone? Most
This post is the third and final in a series that illustrates three different solutions to "flattening" hierarchical data. Don't forget to catch up with Part 1 and Part 2. Solution 2, from my previous post, created one observation per header record, with detail data in a wide format, like
I was recently asked why I would recommend my new class, Explaining Analytics to Decision Makers: Insights to Action. The answer goes back to some great advice, a lunch of eggplant parmesan and in another more twisted way, to what was ironically affectionately known as the “bomb plant.” Early in
