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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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