In this quarter's installment of the SAS/Foresight Webinar Series, Martin Joseph and Alec Finney of Rivershill Consultancy discuss "The Forecasting Mantra." Based on their article in the Winter 2009 issue of Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting, the webinar provides a template that identifies all the elements required to achieve sustained, world-class forecasting
Tag: SAS
We ended last time having selected a cluster of surrogate products -- a subset of the original selection of like-items that had the same attributes as the new product. Judgment has been used throughout the process so far, in specification of the relevant attributes, filtering the original candidate pool of
Seems like we've been here before. It is January, so time again to announce the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For in the US. This year SAS is at #2, our fifth straight year in the top 3, over which our average rank has been 1.8. We've covered this topic
Lately, there's been lots of buzz around the logical data warehouse (LDW). In fact, Gartner is hearing LDW mentions as part of data warehouse (DW) inquiries almost 20% of the time and considers it a "megatrend." The definition usually includes some use of data virtualization or data federation capabilities to complement
Over the years, in all my roles within SAS, I've been asked by customers, friends, family and all sorts of people, "What does SAS do?" Bottom-line: SAS delivers results across the organization, because that is what it was designed to do. Specifically, SAS was designed to deliver analytic results, which
I’m not a coupon junkie. In fact, I feel like a coupon victim. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t get an avalanche of offers from: Email. Snail mail (in catalogs, flyers, coupon books, etc.). In-store flyers. Mobile apps. Store checkout. The vast majority get tossed in my garbage
Another day, another scam defrauding insurers and governments. For purposes of full disclosure, the case I'm highlighting today comes from Washington's Labor and Industries (L&I), the agency where I formerly worked and headed up fraud prevention efforts, and the investigation dates back to my time there. During my time there,
Data. Google uses ours every day, and most people aren't concerned. When our government is looking over our shoulders, however, tensions rise quickly. On the one end lies the recent scandals with the National Security Agency (NSA), which is apparently spying on you, me, and Angela Merkel. On the other lies case after case
In the days before the Internet, I’d pull a promotional flyer or catalog from one of my favorite retailers out of my mailbox or newspaper like an excited kid hoping it contained something I coveted. And at price so amazingly low that I’d feel no guilt in buying it. More
Before that headline really scares you, let me clarify - there hasn't been a single fraud scheme that managed to pull off a $2 trillion haul (yet). However, the fact remains that as rising scams, schemes, the gray market, work under the table and good old tax evasion escalate, as
Welcome to another installment of my blog series Data Preparation and Data Quality on the Road. The main actors here are my two SAS books Data Preparation for Analytics Using SAS (DP) and Data Quality for Analytics Using SAS (DQ), who are allowed to accompany me to many conferences, SAS
This week's SAS tip is from Frederick Pratter and his oft-referenced book Web Development with SAS by Example, Third Edition. In case you're counting, I've featured 5 previous excerpts from Frederick's fine book on this blog. There's so much good content to choose from in this big book. After taking a look at this week's
Like many of you teachers out there, I spent a lot of time recently preparing for the new school year. At home, it began with the therapeutic organization of children's rooms. As I sat amid in outgrown clothes, last year’s school work, and books to donate, I braced myself and
This week's SAS tip is from Lora Delwiche and Susan Slaughter's bestselling The Little SAS Book: A Primer, Fifth Edition. With over 50 years of combined SAS experience, this powerhouse duo has helped thousands of programmers. You, too, can benefit from their instruction. The following excerpt is from SAS Press authors Lora
If you need an excuse to get out of the office and perhaps learn a thing or two this fall, here are three upcoming events: Foresight Practitioner Conference: S&OP and Collaborative Forecasting (Columbus, OH, September 25-26) From the campus of Ohio State University, Foresight's editor Len Tashman and S&OP column
As student growth or value-added measures become more prevalent in educator evaluation systems, many question how those ratings actually help teachers improve their practice. i.e. “How does a level 3 teacher become a level 4 or 5?” Robust and reliable value-added data serve as a great starting point for teachers
Welcome to my new blog series Data Preparation (DP) and Data Quality (DQ) on the road. The main actors here are my two SAS books Data Preparation for Analytics Using SAS and Data Quality for Analytics Using SAS, which are allowed to accompany me to many conferences, SAS events, and
You’ve probably caught on by now that I live in the DC-metro area and suffer daily through the misery of congestion. Before I even reach for my keys, I check for the latest information from regional transportation agencies, especially Metro, to devise my plan of attack. Going way beyond the
SAS Forecast Server (release 12.3) is now shipping, and includes the new SAS Time Series Studio GUI. Time Series Studio (TSS), was released as "experimental" last August in 12.1, and is now in production. TSS provides an additional interface in Forecast Server, for time series data mining, exploration, and data preparation.
Mercifully, we have reached the final installment of Q&A from the June 20 Foresight-SAS webinar, "Forecast Value Added: A Reality Check on Forecasting Practices." As a reminder, a recording of the webinar is available for on-demand review, and the Foresight article (upon which the webinar was based) is available for free
Being an author can be a tough gig. Lots of writing, reviews, edits, cover approvals…the list goes on and on. But often the good times outweigh the tough times. And we’re so lucky that many of our authors have written more than one book for SAS Press. One such author
Q: Is the MAPE of the naive forecast the basis for understanding the forecastability of the behavior? Or are there other more in depth ways to measure the forecastability of a behavior? MAPE of the naive forecast indicates the worst you should be able to forecast the behavior. You can
With this Q&A Part 3, we are about halfway through the questions submitted during the FVA webinar. We did over 15 minutes of live Q&A at the end of the webinar, and covered many of the submitted questions at that time, however I always prefer to issue complete written responses to
Q: Could you send me the presentation? With audio if possible. If you'd like a pdf of the slides, email me directly: mike.gilliland@sas.com For the audio, the webinar recording is available for free on-demand review: FVA: A Reality Check on Forecasting Practices Q: Can we get the case study referred here
As promised in yesterday's Foresight-SAS sponsored webinar on "Forecast Value Added: A Reality Check on Forecasting Practices," here is Part 1 of my written response to the over 25 questions that were submitted during the event. (Note: It may take a week or so to get through all of them.)
If an organization is spending time and money to have a forecasting process, is it not reasonable to expect the process to make the forecast more accurate and less biased (or at least not make it any worse!)? But how would we ever know what the process is accomplishing? To
Imagine a business offering a multitude of products and services that seemingly have little relationship to one another, and all are supported by different data systems. This is the plight of local governments. The products and services produced and managed by local governments range from utilities, solid waste and recycling to parks
Some things are just common sense, and having common academic standards for all states is one of those things. In a national milestone event, 45 states and the District of Columbia recently coalesced around a common set of standards for math and English/language arts. The process did not happen overnight, and there
Students with missing test scores are often highly mobile students and are more likely to be low-achieving students. It is important to include these students in any growth/value-added model to avoid selection bias, which could provide misleading growth estimates to districts, schools and teachers that serve higher populations of these
We’re just coming back from SAS Global Forum, and what a show! SAS Books was there to provide users with the highest-quality resources for learning SAS, and our users were there to tell us what new books they were most looking forward to reading. Kevin Smith's PROC TEMPLATE Made Easy: