Advanced Analytics

Jim MetcalfJune 2, 2015 0

Numeric validation for analytical software testing

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

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Advanced Analytics

Stephen SeilerJune 2, 2015 0

Rowing: What has 150 years of data taught us?

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

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Sports & Entertainment

Advanced Analytics

Ed HughesMay 20, 2015 0

Dinner with a side order of optimization

Good Old Country-Style Optimization In an odd way, Imre Polik's recent post, How to solve puzzles? Peg solitaire with optimization, reminded me of one more reason why I like to eat at Cracker Barrel, an American chain of country-style restaurants.

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandMay 20, 2015 0

Never be left stranded with a two-bin inventory control system (Part 2)

The Two-Bin Inventory Control System So what is a two-bin inventory control system? Whether you realize it or not, you are probably very familiar with the concept. In fact, if you are reading this on a tablet or smartphone, you may be sitting next to one right now (see photo). According to

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandMay 19, 2015 0

Never be left stranded with a two-bin inventory system (Part 1)

As discussed in the last BFD post, sometimes a difficult and expensive problem doesn't have to be solved -- it can simply be avoided. When the teetering boulder threatened the baby below the cliff, we removed the baby and no longer had to worry about propping up the boulder. When it

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English

Advanced Analytics | Learn SAS

Rick WicklinMay 11, 2015 0

Finding observations that satisfy multiple conditions: The LOC-ELEMENT technique

A common task in data analysis is to locate observations that satisfy multiple criteria. For example, you might want to locate all zip codes in certain counties within specified states. The SAS DATA step contains the powerful WHERE statement, which enables you to extract a subset of data that satisfy

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English

Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization

Alan LipsonMay 6, 2015 0

Retailers see checkout analytics pay off with Toshiba partnership

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

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Retail

Advanced Analytics

Emily LadaMay 5, 2015 0

Simulate to validate

The primary objective of many discrete-event simulation projects is system investigation.  Output data from the simulation model are used to better understand the operation of the system (whether that system is real or theoretical), as well as to conduct various "what-if"-type analyses.   However, I recently worked on another model

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English

Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization

Jennifer NenadicMay 4, 2015 0

Will technology replace the need for data scientists?

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

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandMay 1, 2015 0

How to solve a difficult forecasting problem

The Boulder, The Cliff, and The Baby Imagine you are faced with this very urgent problem: A large boulder is teetering on the edge of a cliff, at the bottom of which sits a baby, at risk of being crushed. How do you solve this problem? One solution for the

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandApril 27, 2015 0

Online Forecast Value Added course May 7-8

The SAS Business Knowledge Series now offers an online version of the "Forecast Value Added Analysis" course, taught via live web in two afternoon sessions, May 7-8. The instructor is my colleague Chip Wells, who expanded our original 1/2 day FVA workshop with new material, examples, and exercises based on his

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English

Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandApril 27, 2015 0

FVA interview with Steve Morlidge

The Institute of Business Forecasting's FVA blog series continued on March 2, with my interview of Steve Morlidge of CatchBull. Steve's research (and his articles in Foresight) have been a frequent subject of BFD blog posts over the last couple of years (e.g. The "Avoidability of Forecast Error (4 parts),

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English

Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandApril 24, 2015 0

Guest blogger: Len Tashman previews Spring issue of Foresight

Editor Len Tashman's Preview of the Spring issue of Foresight The Special Feature article of this 37th issue of Foresight – From Sales and Operations Planning to Business Integration – comes about through a rare but effective collaboration between an academic and a practitioner. The coauthors are Mark Moon, head

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Advanced Analytics | Learn SAS

Rick WicklinApril 22, 2015 0

Sum a series in SAS

A customer asked: How do we go about summing a finite series in SAS? For example, I want to compute for various integers n ≥ 3. I want to output two columns, one for the natural numbers and one for the summation of the series. Summations arise often in statistical

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English

Advanced Analytics

Jennifer NenadicApril 15, 2015 0

Jump start your analytics program with visualization and communication

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

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Advanced Analytics

Gerhard SvolbaApril 7, 2015 0

Easter forecasting challenges the Easter Bunny brings

The date of Easter influences our leisure activities Different from many other public holidays, Easter is a so-called movable holiday. This means that the Easter bunny brings more than just eggs for the statistician - he brings special Easter forecasting challenges. In the year 325 CE the Council for Nicea

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English

Advanced Analytics

Rob PrattApril 3, 2015 0

The traveling baseball fan problem

In the traveling salesman problem (TSP), a salesman must minimize travel distance while visiting each of a given set of cities exactly once. Recently, the TSP has generated some buzz in the popular media, after a blog post by Randy Olson. The tour shown was not quite optimal, and Bill

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English

Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandApril 3, 2015 0

Guest blogger: Dr. Chaman Jain previews Winter issue of Journal of Business Forecasting

JBF Special Issue on Predictive Business Analytics Dr. Chaman Jain, professor at St. Johns University, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Business Forecasting, provides his preview of the Winter 2014-15 issue: Predictive Business Analytics, the practice of extracting information from existing data to determine patterns, relationships and future outcomes, is

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English

Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Fiona McNeillMarch 27, 2015 0

What’s it take to be a data scientist?

In February of this year, the Washington Business Journal reported the US Government appointed its first Chief Data Scientist, DJ Patil. With this, I think it’s now safe to say that Data Science is officially sanctioned as new mode in organizations. Those that can apply the necessary finesse along with

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English

Advanced Analytics

Rick WicklinMarch 23, 2015 0

Vectors that have a fractional number of elements

The title of this article makes no sense. How can the number of elements (in fact, the number of anything!) not be a whole number? In fact, it can't. However, the title refers to the fact that you might compute a quantity that ought to be an integer, but is

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English

Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandMarch 11, 2015 0

New! "Demand-Driven Forecasting" course from SAS

My colleague Charlie Chase, Advisory Industry Consultant and author of the book Demand-Driven Forecasting, has developed a new course for the SAS Business Knowledge Series (BKS): Best Practices in Demand-Driven Forecasting. The 2-day course will be offered for the first time April 20-21 in Atlanta (and then again September 24-25 in Chicago). From the

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English

Advanced Analytics

Imre PólikMarch 11, 2015 0

How to solve puzzles? - Peg solitaire with optimization

Peg solitaire I love puzzles; I have a few of them in my office. I regularly use them at interviews: I ask the candidate either to solve a puzzle or to devise a (clever) mathematical algorithm that solves it. I'm sure a lot of readers are familiar with the standard

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English

Advanced Analytics

Rick WicklinMarch 11, 2015 0

Matrix multiplication with missing values in SAS

Sometimes I get contacted by SAS/IML programmers who discover that the SAS/IML language does not provide built-in support for multiplication of matrices that have missing values. (SAS/IML does support elementwise operations with missing values.) I usually respond by asking what they are trying to accomplish, because mathematically matrix multiplication with

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandMarch 6, 2015 0

SAS analytics and forecasting news

♦We learned this week that SAS is ranked #4 on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2015. This makes six straight years ranking in the top four (including twice at #1). ♦The March/April 2015 issue of Analytics Magazine includes a SAS company profile by my colleague Kathy Lange. As

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandMarch 5, 2015 0

Don't fine tune your forecast!

Does your forecast look like a radio? No? Then don't treat it like one. A radio's tuning knob serves a valid purpose. It lets you make fine adjustments, improving reception of the incoming signal, resulting in a clearer and more enjoyable listening experience. But just because you can make fine adjustments to

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandFebruary 23, 2015 0

Offensive vs. defensive forecasting

Sports provide us with many familiar clichés about playing defense, such as: Defense wins championships. The best defense is a good offense. Or my favorite: The best defense is the one that ranks first statistically in overall defensive performance, after controlling for the quality of the offenses it has faced. Perhaps not

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Advanced Analytics

Rick WicklinFebruary 23, 2015 0

Complete cases: How to perform listwise deletion in SAS

SAS procedures usually handle missing values automatically. Univariate procedures such as PROC MEANS automatically delete missing values when computing basic descriptive statistics. Many multivariate procedures such as PROC REG delete an entire observation if any variable in the analysis has a missing value. This is called listwise deletion or using

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandFebruary 19, 2015 0

FVA interview with Shaun Snapp

The Institute of Business Forecasting's FVA blog series continued in January, with my interview of Shaun Snapp, founder and editor of SCM Focus. Some of Shaun's answers surprised me, for example, that he doesn't compare performance to a naïve model (which I see as the  most fundamental FVA comparison). But he went

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English

Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandFebruary 16, 2015 0

Brilliant forecasting article from 1957!!! (Part 3)

This isn't such a brilliant article because we learn something new from it -- we really don't. But it is amazing to find, from someone in 1957, such a clear discussion of forecasting issues that still plague us today. If you can get past some of the Mad Men era words and

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandFebruary 12, 2015 0

Brilliant forecasting article from 1957!!! (Part 2)

Combining Statistical Analysis with Subjective Judgment (continued) After summarily dismissing regression analysis and correlation analysis as panaceas for the business forecasting problem, Lorie turns next to "salesmen's forecasts."* He first echoes the assumption that we still hear today: This technique of sales forecasting has much to commend it. It is based

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