It is said that everything is big in Texas, and that includes big data. During my recent trip to Austin I had the privilege of being a judge in the final round of the Texata Big Data World Championship, a fantastic example of big data competitions. It felt fitting that
As an economist, I started at SAS with a disadvantage when it comes to predictive modeling. After all, like most economists, I was taught how to estimate marginal effects of various programs, or treatment effects, with non-experimental data. We use a variety of identification assumptions and quasi-experiments to make causal
My view of the world is shaped by where I stand, but from this spot the future of analytics for 2016 looks pretty exciting! Analytics has never been more needed or interesting. Machine learning established in the enterprise Machine learning dates back to at least 1950 but until recently has
Macroeconometrics is not dead: (and I wish I had paid better attention in my time series course): I wrote this on the way to see one of our manufacturing clients in Austin, Texas, anticipating a discussion how to use vector autoregressive models in process control. It is a typical use
Can pattern recognition software tell us if it is a Hermit Thrush or a Swainson's Thrush we've seen? A few of us have been debating an identification question at work, because we agreed to help Fulbright Scholar and Duke University PhD student Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela with research she is doing related to bird collisions with windows. A sad
If you turned in for my recent webinar, Machine Learning: Principles and Practice, you may have heard me talking about some of my favorite machine learning resources, including recent white papers and some classic studies. As I mentioned in the webinar, machine learning is not new. SAS has been pursuing
When you work with big data, you often deal with both a large number of observations and a large number of features. When the number of features is large, they can be highly correlated, resulting in significant amount of redundancy in the data. Principal component analysis can be a very
My last post, Pitching analytics: recommendations on how to sell your story, discussed the steps I consider when winding up for an analytics pitch. In part 2 of this series I share the tips and tricks I have acquired for throwing strikes for during your analytics pitch. Like everyone, sometimes
Have you been in your attic lately? Or maybe cleaned out that closet that all of your “stuff” seems to gravitate to? Sure, mostly you’ll just find old junk that is no longer useful or purely nostalgic, but every once in a while you come across those long lost treasures
Gartner has stated that there are nearly five billion connected devices throughout the world today and predicts that there will be more than 25 billion by 2020, making the potential of this technology unlimited. The connected devices in industrial settings, in personal devices, and in our homes are creating a
I’ve often heard people say about weather forecasters “they have the best job…they just report what the models are telling them, and when they’re wrong they can always blame it on Mother Nature throwing us a curve.” While that’s true, this glass-half-empty crowd is failing to appreciate how amazing the
I routinely speak with executives who tell me that the ability to “sell” analytical results is just as important as producing them. In this post I will share some of what I have learned in several years of presenting complicated analytical results to audiences, both technical and lay. Some of
Even though the first papers in machine learning were in the 1950s, one could argue it goes back further to the work of Alan Turing and other early computer scientists. So why has this way of modeling seemingly become so popular now? Because data has become a commodity. Large amounts of many different
I had the pleasure of speaking at the inaugural “Accounting IS Big Data” conference this past week in New York City, a meeting organized by the American Accounting Association. In addition to giving several talks, I participated in breakout sessions in which attendees discussed how analytics is used to monitor
Over my career, I've attended many events where the audience was blasted with the value of analytics -- and the pitch usually fell on deaf ears. The 2015 SAS Energy Analytics Forum (which doubled in size from last year) was vastly different. The attendees had more questions and more urgency to take
I have been working on streaming analytics in conjunction with a project at Duke Energy, so a few months ago I was contacted by a colleague who wanted to look at the feasibility of applying what I’ve learned to our Internet of Things (IoT) initiative. In particular, we wanted to see if
You may not be in London on October 7 to take advantage of the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting's free workshop on promotional forecasting. However, there are still plenty of forecasting educational opportunities coming up this fall: SAS Business Knowledge Series Best Practices in Demand-Driven Forecasting (Chicago, September 24-25) My colleague
SAS is hosting this year’s European Analytics 2015 conference in Rome November 9 – 11. This three-day inspiring event will give you the chance to boost your company’s analytics culture in an international environment to make sure your knowledge and expertise meet the demands of the digital era. But what if
Right now I’m crossing the Pacific toward Australia and New Zealand for the 21st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (a.k.a. KDD), a Data Science Melbourne MeetUp, and the SAS Users of New Zealand conference. New Zealand is the birthplace of open source R. So this trip
It’s been very hot here in Northern Italy: electricity provision has struggled to keep up and we’ve had frequent power outages in the area, even within our apartment building. A bit inconvenient? Don’t get me started. I feel like my home appliances have turned against me, taking me back to
You have to be "in it to win it" as they say. This is becoming the case for many organisations that need to start using data to make better, evidence-based business decisions. Today, using analytics is not so much a data lottery as a data necessity. Some businesses may not
On May 7, 2015, Conservatives defied the polls and won the UK general election, handing Labour and Liberal Democrats a surprising defeat. Now, with Chancellor George Osborne presenting his budget in a few days' time (July 8), the new Conservative government is tackling how it will deliver on its campaign promises. That means
How do we hire data scientists at SAS, since we are not unique in our search for a rare talent type that continues to be in high demand? This post is the last in a series on finding data scientists, based on best practices at SAS and illustrated with some
I am noticing a trend. At the ASSA meetings in January (where economics, sociology and finance academics and practitioners gather to discuss their research) I was surprised to see how much “machine learning” was trending with economists. The session “Machine Learning Methods in Economics and Econometrics,” with papers by Susan
USA Today recently published an article titled 10 retailers take two-thirds of your money. The story highlights the revenue distribution among the Top 100 retailers in the S&P 1500. It was startling to see that such a small number of retail powerhouses take in such a large percentage of consumers’ income.
There is a job category unfamiliar to most people that plays a crucial role in the creation of analytics software. Most can surmise that SAS hires software developers with backgrounds in statistics, econometrics, forecasting or operations research to create our analytical software; however, most do not realize there is another
Every year rowers get faster, records are broken, medals are won, but can this trajectory continue? Rowing as a sport lends itself well to data analysis and at the British Rowing Sports Science and Medicine Conference earlier this year I shared some insights the rowing community has gleaned from the
On Monday, SAS announced the beginning of a new era with its Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions OEM partnership. This is the first time SAS has provided its technology for an equipment manufacturer to wrap into its solution to help retail customers gain the benefits of advanced analytics. We always ask
I read an interesting article recently that suggested analyst and data scientist job positions may be on the way out. The author argued that analytics are being incorporated more and more heavily into operational systems, making “analytic capabilities” more readily accessible to business users without the involvement of a data scientist. Being a data
With so much information available about high-performance analytics, business intelligence and visual analytics, it can be difficult to know exactly where to begin, especially if you don’t have a team of statisticians standing by. I'm frequently asked by customers who hope to take advantage of analytics how to get started. How do
