When you work at headquarters of the leader in advanced analytics software, you never know who you'll encounter in the lobby. It might be celebrity statistician (and New York Times FiveThirtyEight blogger) Nate Silver, of The Signal and the Noise and election forecasting fame. It might be Donald Wheeler, giant
In a previous post I discussed managing analytic all-stars. Now, let's talk about how you can really use the skills of your all-stars to benefit the company. How can you make sure your analytic resources add value within the organization? Increasingly we see both our customers and teams internal to
My wife rescued a dog a couple of years ago from a rural North Carolina rest stop . We named her "DOTi" in honor of the Department of Transportation. It took a while for us to get into the swing of being responsible owners; sometimes the first to leave for
In part 1 of my thoughts about analytics maturity, I deferred talking about issues related to the actual assessment of your organization’s level. Today I intend to detail some of the ways my peers and I are thinking about analytical maturity, comment on scales in use today, and address some
How do you hire a Chief Data Scientist? That's not a hypothetical question: I know of at least three companies that are actively looking for a "Chief Data Scientist" at the moment. Hiring the right person is harder than you'd think. Whether or not a Chief Data Scientist is a
“We may not see it but math is everywhere around us,” says Paul T. Savarese, Technical Support Statistician at SAS. You don’t have to be a statistician to enjoy this interview, in which Savarese discusses target shooting, Jay Leno and Guinness beer – and ties it all back to the fascinating subject
Andy Pulkstenis of State Farm thinks it is, stating that this red-headed stepchild among modeling technques is where predictive modeling was ten years ago. He opened his talk, "Do You Know or Do You Think You Know? Creating a Testing Culture at State Farm," at the A2012 conference in Las Vegas with
What's the difference between data mining, forecasting and optimization? When should you use each technique, and how do they interact? Jeremy TerBush, Vice President of Global Analytics, Wyndham Exchange and Rentals explains that he uses all techniques together in an overall predictive process. "Data mining is first step in the system,"
A year ago I set out to periodically blog from my perspective of leading R&D for our advanced analytics software. I invited SAS colleagues who also work in various areas of advanced analytics to blog on their own interesting conversations with each other and with customers about the intersection of
A senior manager in the analytics product management group, Tonya Balan sees herself as a bridge between SAS customers and R&D, ensuring that SAS products stay relevant to the needs of the customer. With a background in statistics and experience as a college professor, Tonya shares her excellent advice and
Imre Polik, senior operations research specialist in the operations research group, truly qualifies as a math lover. Having studied math his entire life—and having taught it for two years—Imre offers some valuable words of wisdom and experience. He even has a couple of stories and jokes up his sleeves! Read
Tammy Jackson, a senior research statistician developer in the economics technology group, says her job is like taking a math test all day—but she wouldn’t have it any other way. With a background in matrices, linear algebra and math education, Tammy is proud of her work and has a keen eye for
Fraud detection presents myriad analytical challenges: gathering sufficient known cases to make typical modeling techniques possible, gathering inputs from disparate data sources, and combining expert knowledge from investigators with findings to be gleaned from the data in an efficient way. Of course, analysts can fall into the trap of thinking
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
“Wise Enterprise: Best Practices for Managing Predictive Analytics” was the title, and the assignment to the panel at the recent Predictive Analytics World conference in New York was to share “poignant moments of failure.” Wayne Thompson from SAS began, going back ten years to describe a network intrusion project. He
Reflecting on my 25 years as a data analyst, I’ve always felt that there is something more to being a good applied statistician than just applying what I had learned from school. What are those key skills that make a good field statistician? Before analytics came into play, when presented with
Last week, a new film featuring Brad Pitt came to theaters, and for a change, I’ll be dragging my wife to see it instead of the other way around. Moneyball is based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis (2003) which chronicles the new-age, statistically driven philosophy successfully adopted by
Emails – it’s hard to imagine that there used to be a time people worked without them – at least in our industry. When I started at SAS in 1996 the amount of business email I received on a particular day was almost less than the amount of spam mails
The promise of high-performance analytics, as I understand it, is this: Regardless of how you store your data or how much of it there is, complex analytical procedures can still access that data, conduct a series of calculations on that data and provide answers quickly, accurately and using the full
There are many things that I enjoy in life, but cooking and analytics are two of the things that excite me the most. In my free time, one of my favorite things to do is experiment in the kitchen to try to come up with something new and different to
Rome was not built in a day. Similarly, high-performance analytics is a product of many cumulative architectural, computational and analytical advances. The ability to solve complex business problems by applying algorithms from multiple disciplines to increasingly large volumes of data of all types - both structured and unstructured - is
