Move beyond spreadsheets to data mining, forecasting, optimization – and more
This year's SAS Global Forum conference will take place April 18-21 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. For SAS/OR, SAS staff will present two Super Demos and three papers:
SAS will have a major presence at the 2016 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research, which will be held at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress hotel in Orlando, FL on April 10-12. Many SAS staff will participate in this conference. SAS/OR, the SAS Global Academic Program, and JMP
"I've seen the future of data science, and it is filled with estrogen!" This was the opening remark at a recent talk I heard. If only I'd seen that vision of the future when I was in college. You see, I’ve always loved math (and still do). My first calculus
I've got scale on my mind! While speeding down the rails from Brussels to Paris on the TGV (the sleek, high-speed train), the scale of speed is breathtaking. In previous generations, going from Brussels to Paris for a single-day meeting would have inevitably involved a plane, with check-ins, security, travel
I recently read the book "Die Zahl die aus der Kälte kam" (which would be The Number That Came in from the Cold in English) written by the Austrian mathematician Rudolf Taschner. He is ingenious at presenting complex mathematical relationships to a broader audience. One of his examples deals with
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of the Spring Issue of Foresight Misbehaving, the feature section of this 41st issue of Foresight, was prompted by the publication of Richard Thaler’s eye-opening book of the same title, a work that explains the often surprising gap between (a) the models we use and organizational
According to Lloyd Dean, president and CEO, "At Dignity Health, we are committed to developing partnerships and opportunities that harness the tremendous potential of technology, from improving the patient experience to providing caregivers with tools that will support their day-to-day care decisions." Dignity Health, one of the largest health systems
The new book Business Forecasting: Practical Problems and Solutions contains a large section of recent articles on forecasting performance evaluation and reporting. Among the contributing authors is Rob Hyndman, Professor of Statistics at Monash University in Australia. To anyone needing an introduction, Hyndman's credentials include: Editor-in-chief of International Journal of
This is my second article about voice of customer analysis; you can find the first here. The first time we discussed that a simple sentiment polarity score was a rather a narrow view. This time we will examine a more insightful approach, using voice of customer analysis to monitor customers’ opinions
Here's a golf puzzle from Sam Loyd: Everybody is playing golf now, and even the lazy ones who a few weeks ago declared how much pleasanter it was to swing in a shady hammock, have caught the golf fever and are chasing the ball around the golf links. I am
Gerade lese ich mit großem Interesse die neue BARC-Studie "Advanced & Predictive Analytics 2016". Und ich bin sehr froh, dass der Nutzen von Analytics nahezu unbestritten ist. Egal, ob erfahrene "Best-in-Class"-Unternehmen oder analytische Nachzügler:
"The Role of Model Interpretability in Data Science" is a recent post on Medium.com by Carl Anderson, Director of Data Science at the fashion eyeware company Warby Parker. Anderson argues that data scientists should be willing to make small sacrifices in model quality in order to deliver a model that
This is the first of two articles looking at how to listen to what your customers are saying and act upon it – that is, how to understand the voice of the customer. Over the last few years, one of the big uses for SAS® Text Analytics has been to
Super Bowl 50 (L?) is this Sunday, so it's time for another (American) football-related post. Steven Miller, a mathematics professor at Rutgers University, recently noted that the 2015 NFL schedule allowed a competitive advantage for some teams (including the Carolina Panthers). This figure he generated displays the 2015 regular season
Last week I showed how to use PROC EXPAND to compute moving averages and other rolling statistics in SAS. Unfortunately, PROC EXPAND is part of SAS/ETS software and not every SAS site has a license for SAS/ETS. For simple moving averages, you can write a DATA step program, as discussed
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
Editor Len Tashman's preview of the Winter 2016 issue of Foresight This 40th issue of Foresight begins with a review of the new book by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner with the enticing title Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Reviewer Steve Morlidge explains that …the “superforecasters” of the
In SAS, the aspect ratio of a graph is the physical height of the graph divided by the physical width. Recently I demonstrated how to set the aspect ratio of graphs in SAS by using the ASPECT= option in PROC SGPLOT or by using the OVERLAYEQUATED statement in the Graph
Announcing New Book: Business Forecasting Just in time for the new year, Business Forecasting: Practical Problems and Solutions compiles the field's most important and thought provoking new literature into a single comprehensive reference for the business forecaster. So says the marketing literature. The real story? The book does pretty much
I began 2016 by compiling a list of popular articles from my blog in 2015. This "People's Choice" list contains many interesting articles, but some of my personal favorites did not make the list. Today I present the "Editor's Choice" list of articles that deserve a second look. I've grouped
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
Over the course of my career as industrial engineer turned supply chain planning advocate I've had the opportunity to work hands-on with many manufacturing and supply chain planning solutions. This has included solutions offered commercially by the usual suspects of ERP and post-SCM consolidation supply chain solution providers. Most of these
The British spy agency GCHQ recently posted a grid-shading puzzle that the director sent out in his Christmas cards this year. The puzzle, shown here, is known as a nonogram and by various other names, including Paint by Numbers and FigurePic: Each cell is to be colored black or white,
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
In conjunction with the International Institute of Forecasters and the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University, the 2016 Foresight Practitioner conference will be held in Raleigh, NC (October 5-6, 2016) with the theme of: Worst Practices in Forecasting: Today's Mistakes to Tomorrow's Breakthroughs This is the first
"Why forecasting is important" gets searched over 100 times monthly on Google. Search results include plenty of rah-rah articles touting the obvious benefits of an "accurate forecast," but are of little help in the real life business world where high levels of forecast accuracy are usually not achieved. This is
Journal of Business Forecasting columnist Larry Lapide is a longtime favorite of mine. As an industry analyst at AMR, and more recently as an MIT Research Affiliate, Larry's quarterly column is a perpetual source of guidance for the practicing business forecaster. No wonder he received IBF's 2012 Lifetime Achievement in
WRAL Chief Meteorologist (and Friend Of the Business Forecasting Deal) Greg Fishel garnered national attention recently with a thoughtful (yet to some, provocative) blog post on climate change. In the post, Fishel chronicled his evolving thought on the subject. He argued for an end to the political partisanship that stifles
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
