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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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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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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandFebruary 11, 2015 0

Guest blogger: Len Tashman previews Winter 2015 issue of Foresight

*** We interrupt discussion of James H. Lorie's 1957 article with this important announcement *** Hot off the wire, here is editor Len Tashman's preview of the Winter 2015 issue of Foresight: Foresight kicks off its 10th year with the publication of a new survey of business forecasters: Improving Forecast Quality in

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandFebruary 9, 2015 0

Brilliant forecasting article from 1957!!!

Brilliant, humorous, and obscure. Those words could describe two of my favorite comedians, Emo Philips* and the late Dennis Wolfberg. They could also describe, with the addition of "exceedingly" brilliant, "scathingly" humorous, and "apparently totally" obscure, a 1957 article, "Two Important Problems in Sales Forecasting" by James H. Lorie (The

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Advanced Analytics

Rick WicklinFebruary 9, 2015 0

Create an array of matrices in SAS

The SAS DATA step supports multidimensional arrays. However, matrices in SAS/IML are like mathematical matrices: they are always two dimensional. In simulation studies you might need to generate and store thousands of matrices for a later statistical analysis of their properties. How can you accomplish that unless you can create

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Advanced Analytics

Matthew GalatiFebruary 6, 2015 0

The kidney exchange problem

Suppose someone needs a kidney transplant and a family member is willing to donate one. If the donor and recipient are incompatible (because of blood types, tissue mismatch, and so on), the transplant cannot happen. Now suppose two donor-recipient pairs A and B are in this situation, but donor A

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Advanced Analytics | Students & Educators

Polly Mitchell-GuthrieFebruary 6, 2015 0

The unicorn quest continues – more tips on finding data scientists (part 3)

Because finding analytical talent continues to be a challenge for most, here I offer tips 5, 6, and 7 of my ten tips for finding data scientists, based on best practices at SAS and illustrated with some of our own “unicorns.” You can read my first blog post for why they

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Advanced Analytics

Rick WicklinFebruary 4, 2015 0

Specify the order of variables at run time in SAS

In SAS, the order of variables in a data set is usually unimportant. However, occasionally SAS programmers need to reorder the variables in order to make a special graph or to simplify a computation. Reordering variables in the DATA step is slightly tricky. There are Knowledge Base articles about how

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Advanced Analytics | Learn SAS

Rick WicklinFebruary 2, 2015 0

Detect empty parameters that are passed to a SAS/IML module

A SAS/IML programmer asked a question on a discussion forum, which I paraphrase below: I've written a SAS/IML function that takes several arguments. Some of the arguments have default values. When the module is called, I want to compute some quantity, but I only want to compute it for the

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Advanced Analytics

PMUs in the power grid

Brad KlenzJanuary 26, 2015 0

What makes the smart grid “smart”? Analytics, of course!

You’ve heard about the smart grid, but what is it that makes the grid smart? I’ve been working on a project with Duke Energy and NC State University doing time-series analysis on data from Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) that illustrates the intelligence in the grid as well as an interesting

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Foresight Cover

Mike GillilandJanuary 24, 2015 0

ATM Replenishment: Forecasting + Optimization

Why do people steal ATMs? Because that's where the money is!!! While the old "smash-n-grab" remains a favorite modus operandi of would-be ATM thieves, the biggest brains on the planet typically aren't engaged in such endeavors (see Thieves Steal Empty ATM, Chain Breaks Dragging Stolen ATM, An A for Effort). And of

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandJanuary 16, 2015 0

FVA Interview with Jonathon Karelse

In December the Institute of Business Forecasting published the first of a new blog series on Forecast Value Added. Each month I will be interviewing an industry forecasting practitioner (or consultant/vendor) about their use of FVA analysis. The December interview featured Jonathon Karelse, co-founder of NorthFind Partners. Among his key

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Advanced Analytics | Learn SAS

Rick WicklinJanuary 7, 2015 0

Compute the kth smallest data value in SAS

A SAS programmer recently posted a question to the SAS/IML Support Community about how to compute the kth smallest value in a vector of numbers. In the DATA step, you can use the SMALLEST function to find the smallest value in an array, but there is no equivalent built-in function

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandDecember 23, 2014 0

Forecasting research project ideas

There are some things every company should know about the nature of its business. Yet many organizations don't know these fundamentals -- either because they are short on resources, or their resources don't have the analytical skills to do the work. The summer research projects offered by the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting,

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandDecember 22, 2014 0

Do you have a forecasting research project?

The Lancaster Centre for Forecasting is seeking Master Student Projects in Forecasting, Data Mining, or Analytics for summer of 2015. Projects normally run from mid-May to mid-August, with reports issued a few weeks after. These projects are a cost efficient way for a company to carry out analytical work by

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Advanced Analytics | Learn SAS | Students & Educators

Kenneth SanfordDecember 19, 2014 0

Are there jobs for economists in analytics?

SAS will again be participating in the Allied Social Science Association annual meetings in January. This year the event will be held in Boston, and conference organizers expect more than 12,000 participants from a variety of backgrounds, including economics, finance and many other social sciences. One of the primary functions

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Advanced Analytics

Matthew GalatiDecember 16, 2014 0

Santa's gift assignment problem

Just yesterday, Santa called my cell phone asking for a favor... Yes, Santa has my direct line, and I owe him (he once did me a solid, back in 1984, for Christmas, scoring me an awesome Optimus Prime Transformer). That's me there in the front - sporting plaid duds and

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Advanced Analytics | Machine Learning

Phil WeissDecember 15, 2014 0

Don’t be fooled: there’s really only two basic types of distributed processing

Every time I pick up a new article about analytics, I am always disappointed by the fact that I cannot find any specifics mentioned about back-end processing. It is no secret that every vendor wishes they had the latest and greatest parallel processing capabilities, but the truth is that many

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Advanced Analytics | Learn SAS

Rick WicklinDecember 15, 2014 0

Elementwise minimum and maximum operators

Like most programming languages, the SAS/IML language has many functions. However, the SAS/IML language also has quite a few operators. Operators can act on a matrix or on rows or columns of a matrix. They are less intuitive, but can be quite powerful because they enable you perform computations without

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandDecember 12, 2014 0

Alfred Hitchcock and a classic forecasting scam

The Forecasting Savant Suppose you received an email from a self-proclaimed forecasting savant, advising you of a big upset in the upcoming mayoral election...and it turns out to be correct. You then get an email picking the underdog in the next championship boxing match...which is right again. Over the course

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Advanced Analytics

Emily LadaDecember 4, 2014 0

Using simulation to help Duke Hospital's tiniest patients

Last year, my SAS Simulation Studio R&D team began a discrete-event simulation modeling project of a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) with two doctors from Duke University’s Division of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine. After several initial meetings discussing such things as necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), patent ductus arteriosis (PDA), and

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandDecember 2, 2014 0

SAS forecasting and econometrics "tip of the week"

SAS Support Communities provide a forum in which to engage and share with your fellow SAS experts, now in over 20 topic areas including Forecasting and Econometrics. This is the go-to website for your hard core modeling questions, such as "Holdouts in PROC ARIMA," "2-stage Heckman (1979) procedure," and the

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandDecember 2, 2014 0

Foresight/SAS webinar December 3: Getting real about uncertainty

Just a reminder that on Wednesday, December 3, 10:00am ET, Paul Goodwin will be delivering the next Foresight/SAS Webinar on "Getting Real About Uncertainty." From the description: Many forecasts only tell us about things like probable events, expected sales and prospective demand. Often they tell us nothing about the level

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Advanced Analytics | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Compute minimum and maximum of rows and columns in SAS

Rick WicklinDecember 1, 2014 0

Compute maximum and minimum values for rows and columns in SAS

A common question on SAS discussion forums is how to compute the minimum and maximum values across several variables. It is easy to compute statistics across rows by using the DATA step. This article shows how to compute the minimum and maximum values for each observation (across variables) and, for

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