I recently saw a cool graph showing the US import/export trade deficit. But after studying it a bit, I realized I was perceiving it wrong. Follow along in this blog, to find out what the problem was, and how I redesigned the graph to avoid it. I was looking through dadaviz.com
In the oil and gas industry, analytics are used to improve both upstream and downstream operations, from optimizing exploration and forecasting production to reducing commodity trading risk and understanding customer's energy needs. If you plan to derive value from the digital oil field, big data, and analytics, one of the first things
We are all modelers. Whenever you plan, you are building a model. Whenever you imagine, you are building a model. When you create, write, paint or speak, you first build in your head a model of what you want to accomplish, and then fill in the details with words, movements
In a complicated, fast-paced and connected world, you don’t succeed alone. SAS and Cloudera have a successful partnership that dates back several years. Our products are complementary and provide significant quantifiable value to customers who run them on the same cluster. Add Intel to the mix and you have a trio
July has been an exciting month for me. Not only because of the historic Tour de France this year... but even more because this month the new offering SAS Factory Miner was officially released! With SAS Factory Miner you can run predictive models in an automated model tournament environment to
Good news...an analytics survey last year found that 72% of insurance executive agreed that analytics is the biggest game-changer in the next 2 years. Bad news...compared to other industries the adoption rates of analytics in the insurance has lagged other industries. To reverse this trend and help insurers travel down the
When I was a kid, I remember a motivational poster on my dentist's wall that said "You don't have to brush all your teeth -- only the ones you want to keep." That poster really made me think, and brush my teeth! And now that I'm a data-analyst adult, I think
Durante los últimos años, Tamara Dull, directora de tecnologías emergentes para SAS Best Practices, ha escrito mucho sobre Big Data. Sus conclusiones son interesantes: pensamos que el big data es algo nuevo, pero la verdad, hemos lidiado con él durante años; el correo electrónico, las fotos, los videos, los archivos
One of the most important skills for data scientists and business analytical professionals is communications. If decision makers and managers don't understand what the numbers mean -- results won't turn into action. Jeff Zeanah, President of Z Solutions, Inc. has been presenting on the topic of speaking “analytics” for many
On July 14, 2015 SAS released SAS Factory Miner, our latest advanced data mining and machine learning product. This new product provides automated predictive modeling by segment in a high velocity grid enabled environment, allowing modelers to run hundreds of models within minutes and find champion models by segment quickly.
I recently came across some very interesting data on serial killings ... but it was in tabular/text form. This seemed like an invitation for me to create some graphs that make it easier to understand the data. It seems many people have a morbid curiosity about serial killers. For example, some
“Aquellos que no conocen su pasado están condenados a repetirlo” La retrospección es un proceso lento. Así como en los seres humanos aún persisten en el tiempo comportamientos que no funcionan, en las organizaciones perduran procesos de información que se rompen y pueden causar grandes crisis ¿cómo evitarlo? En la
Technology has brought the world a great deal of good, but the downside is that we’re increasingly vulnerable to some seriously scary stuff: Terrorists taking control of airplanes through the in-flight entertainment system. Governments breaking into secure systems and stealing identities. Thugs messing with the steering of self-driving cars. When
Dust off that old aphorism about an ounce of prevention. Oil companies applying analytics for predictive maintenance can see a substantial downtick in the unanticipated equipment repairs that quickly eat into an oil well’s profitability. Maintenance is far from a trivial concern in the oilfield. A pumping oil well is
Update: The winning sessions are Data mining - open source integration with SAS and Forecasting - multistage models for highly seasonal and/or sparse demand series. Get registered for the conference today. We'll see you in Las Vegas! __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Analytics 2015 conference in Las Vegas, Oct. 26 and 27 is designed for
The insurance industry is heading for a crisis. Depending on which report you read the insurance industry is facing a shortfall in job vacancy from anything from 40,000 to nearly half million in the next few years. Baby boomers in specialized jobs like underwriters and claims adjusters are retiring and insurers
I just spent much of the past week watching and trying to ride waves on the North Carolina coast. Small waves, mind you, nothing spectacular and certainly nothing that you would consider edgy or life-altering. Nothing that big wave surfers like Laird Hamilton, Garrett McNamara and others of their substance
What does the future of analytics look like in your organizations enterprise architecture? Does it include thinking about a two speed approach to analytics which includes both: An agile rapidly changing analytics platform for innovation (a lab) seperated from operations and broad enterprise audience usage A slowly moving systematic enterprise analytics platform (a factory)
¿De qué nos sirve saber sobre analítica, si realmente no conocemos el valor e impacto que tiene en los negocios y en nuestra vida? Si usted es de los que se hace esta pregunta, es momento de tomar decisiones al respecto. Cuando hablamos de analítica empresarial, estamos hablando de una solución
I’m not a big gambler, but there is something I would put my money on – analytics. Analytics is helping companies turn information into value. And yes, I mean money. If you want to learn about the latest analytics trends and get in on some of that “value” – attend
What is it that people like so much about motorcycles? The thrill/excitement/freedom of riding them, the 'biker image' portrayed in movies, or great songs such as Little Honda by the Hondells? I'm not a biker per say, but I do have a couple of motorcycles, and am a known associate
Greece has been in the news lately, trying to secure funds to repay 1.5 billion euros to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by the end of the month. And as luck would have it, there is some data available and some graphs to be created ... I love this job!
Nope - we're not digging up mummies in pyramids and analyzing the gender - this blog is about population pyramid charts and "digging into data"! But since the title might have lured in some pyramid fans, here's a picture of my friend Angela posing beside a pyramid - pretty cool, eh?!?
After doing some recent research with IDC®, I got to thinking again about the reasons that organizations of all sizes in all industries are so slow at adopting analytics as part of their ‘business as usual’ operations. While I have no hard statistics on who is and who isn’t adopting
Big data. Streaming data. Complex data. We’ve all heard the reasons why organizations feel like they’re facing an insurmountable data challenge. Now, it’s time to do something about it. For the past few years, SAS has helped some of the world’s leading companies make sense of an avalanche of data.
One of my earlier blogs on handling percent (%) values in SAS was very popular (it's been viewed over 34,000 times!), so I thought I'd write a similar blog on handling time (mm:ss.ss) values in SAS ... This past weekend I was in a dragonboat race (that's me in the
Who is your best customer? The answer to this question can vary dramatically depending on your industry. A retailer’s best customer is someone who comes back to their store over and over again. A gym owner’s best customer could be considered consumer who pays their monthly on time but never
People are such an important aspect of data analytics. I was reminded of this at the recent Strata+Hadoop World event, where I saw first hand that the UK is indeed facing the same skills gaps as elsewhere in the world. Perhaps that didn’t surprise me, but I also noticed the
What cities have the most and least profitable public transportation services in the US? Perhaps you can find out in this graphical visualization of the data! The US data I'm analyzing here covers things like buses, vans, and rail ... but it might be even more interesting to analyze data from
I remember when I first started in public child welfare 21 years ago and the word "outcomes" was introduced. At that time, we believed that if it felt good and children and families seemed happy that we were doing a good job - those were our outcomes. We were wrong.
