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Advanced Analytics

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandOctober 8, 2014 0

Significant Digits in Business Forecasting

My favorite dog trick is the group hug. This is achieved by taking a dog's bad habit (rising up on strangers who don't really want a 70# dog rising up on them), and "flipping it" into something cute and adorable. It's all a matter of controlling perception, and that is

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Advanced Analytics

Rick WicklinOctober 8, 2014 0

The name of a parameter in the parent environment

SAS/IML 13.1 includes a handy function for programmers who write a lot of modules. The PARENTNAME function obtains the name of the symbol that was passed in as a parameter to a user-defined module. How is this useful? Well, suppose that you want to create a SAS/IML module that prints

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics | Customer Intelligence | Data Management

Alan LipsonSeptember 30, 2014 0

Get your house in order to cash in on retail’s omnichannel promise

Would you build a house without a proper foundation? Most of us wouldn’t dare, but that’s exactly what many retail businesses are doing today. When building a house, if you don’t get the foundation right, paint, wallpaper and fixtures won’t matter much. It’s no different in the retail industry. Success

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandSeptember 4, 2014 0

5 steps to setting forecasting performance objectives (Part 2)

And now for the five steps: 1. Ignore industry benchmarks, past performance, arbitrary objectives, and what management "needs" your accuracy to be. Published benchmarks of industry forecasting performance are not relevant. See this prior post The perils of forecasting benchmarks for explanation. Previous forecasting performance may be interesting to know, but

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandSeptember 4, 2014 0

5 steps to setting forecasting performance objectives (Part 1)

It is after Labor Day in the US, meaning we must no longer wear white shoes, skirts, jackets, or trousers. But even if you are now going sans-culotte, it is time to begin thinking about organizational performance objectives for 2015. Setting forecasting performance objectives is one way for management to shine...or

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandSeptember 4, 2014 0

Reminder: September 30 deadline for IIF/SAS Research Grants

I wanted to pass along this reminder from Pam Stroud at the International Institute of Forecasters: Grant to Promote Research on Forecasting For the twelfth year, the IIF, in collaboration with SAS®, is proud to announce financial support for research on how to improve forecasting methods and business forecasting practice.

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Advanced Analytics | Machine Learning | SAS Events

Polly Mitchell-GuthrieAugust 29, 2014 0

Building a $1 billion machine learning model

At the KDD conference this week I heard a great invited presentation called How to Create a $1 billion Model in 20 days: Predictive Modeling in the Real World – A Sprint Case Study. It was presented by Tracey de Poalo from Sprint and former Kaggle President and well known

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Advanced Analytics | SAS Events

Kenneth SanfordAugust 27, 2014 0

Why corporate economists are hot again and a great source for analytical talent

A while back The Wall Street Journal published the article “Corporate Economists Are Hot Again“ that chronicles the resurgence of in-house economists in corporate America. The role of a corporate economist may bring about visuals of classic economist stereotypes (watch Ben Stein play to this stereotype as a teacher in

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics | Data Visualization

Robert AllisonAugust 26, 2014 0

Will California dry up and fall off?

When the recent earthquake hit California, one of my friends commented that "California is so dry right now, I'm surprised it didn't just break off and fall into the ocean!" It got me wondering, just how bad and widespread is California's drought? I did a few Web searches and found lots

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Advanced Analytics | Machine Learning

Polly Mitchell-GuthrieAugust 22, 2014 0

Looking backwards, looking forwards: SAS, data mining, and machine learning

Looking forward, ten of my SAS colleagues and I are heading to New York City this weekend for KDD 2014: Data Science for the Social Good, which runs August 24-27. This event’s full name is the 20th Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining,

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Advanced Analytics

Gerhard SvolbaAugust 8, 2014 0

An intuitive approach to the appropriate use of forecasts

It is a mild summer evening in July at Lake Neusiedl here in Austria. The participants of the traditional YES Cup Regatta are sitting with beer and barbecue chops on the terrace of our clubhouse. The mood is relaxed, and everyone wants to tell their story after two eventful races.

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Advanced Analytics

Rick WicklinJuly 28, 2014 0

Lexicographic combinations in SAS

In a previous blog post, I described how to generate combinations in SAS by using the ALLCOMB function in SAS/IML software. The ALLCOMB function in Base SAS is the equivalent function for DATA step programmers. Recall that a combination is a unique arrangement of k elements chosen from a set

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandJuly 18, 2014 0

Forecasting and supply chain blogs

In the summer heat, when The BFD alone isn't quite quenching your thirst for forecasting know-how, here are several other sources: CatchBlog -- by Steve Morlidge of CatchBull From his 2010 book Future Ready (co-authored with Steve Player), to his recent 4-part series in Foresight dealing with the "avoidability" of forecast

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Advanced Analytics

Jack HymansonJuly 17, 2014 0

Beyond sensing and shaping... Beyond supply and demand

What is your primary goal as a supply chain professional? It’s not about demand sensing, demand shaping or even supply planning and demand planning. At the end of the day, it’s about profit optimization. Albeit important, demand sensing and shaping are only a piece of the equation and if isolated, decisions

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Advanced Analytics | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJuly 16, 2014 0

How to share SAS/IML programs with the world

Have you written a SAS/IML program that you think is particularly clever? Are you the proud author of SAS/IML functions that extend the functionality of SAS software? You've worked hard to develop, debug, and test your program, so why not share it with others? There is now a location for

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandJuly 15, 2014 0

IIF/SAS grants to support research on forecasting

Again this year (for the 12th time), SAS Research & Development has funded two $5,000 research grants, to be awarded by the International Institute of Forecasters. Criteria for award of the grant will include likely impact on forecasting methods and business applications. Consideration will be given to new researchers in

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Advanced Analytics

Rick WicklinJuly 14, 2014 0

A log transformation of positive and negative values

In my four years of blogging, the post that has generated the most comments is "How to handle negative values in log transformations." Many people have written to describe data that contain negative values and to ask for advice about how to log-transform the data. Today I describe a transformation

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Advanced Analytics

David PopeJuly 9, 2014 0

How to dilute the value of analytics

Business Intelligence (BI) can mean many things to many people, but generally BI is associated with business reports. When you fold business analytics (BA), especially advanced analytics that are predictive or prescriptive, under the BI umbrella you inherently dilute the value proposition that analytics can provide to an organization. Why

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Renee NockerJuly 8, 2014 0

What is a better decision worth?

The word “analytics” is widely misused and misunderstood. While SAS arguably invented the advanced analytics and predictive analytics categories more than 38 years ago, other software vendors have used the term to describe things like reporting, monitoring, and tracking what happened. The value of these more simple capabilities are easily

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandJuly 3, 2014 0

Foresight/SAS webinar: forecasting on mobile devices

On July 24, 10am ET, Stavros Asimakopoulos delivers the next installment of the Foresight/SAS Webinar Series, "Forecasting 'In the Pocket': Mobile Devices Can Improve Collaboration." Based on his article (co-authored with George Boretos and Constantinos Mourlas) in the Winter 2014 issue of Foresight, Stavros will discuss how smartphones, tablet computers

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandJune 27, 2014 0

Forecasting across a time hierarchy with temporal reconciliation

The BFD blog probably won't make you the best forecaster you can be. There are plenty of books and articles and world class forecasting researchers (many of them meeting next week in Rotterdam at the International Symposium on Forecasting), that can teach you the most sophisticated techniques to squeeze every last

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Advanced Analytics

Annelies TjetjepJune 25, 2014 0

Treat Yourself with Text

Did you check your email and/or favourite social media site before leaving for work this morning? Did you do it before getting out of bed? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. I do it every morning as a little treat while I “wake up” and whether I realize it or not,

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Advanced Analytics

Udo SglavoJune 18, 2014 0

Combined forecasts: what to do when one model isn’t good enough

My esteemed colleague and recently-published author Jared Dean shared some thoughts on how ensemble models help make better predictions. For predictive modeling, Jared explains the value of two main forms of ensembles --bagging and boosting. It should not be surprising that the idea of combining predictions from more than one

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Advanced Analytics

Rick WicklinJune 18, 2014 0

Approximating a distribution from published quantiles

A colleague asked me an interesting question: I have a journal article that includes sample quantiles for a variable. Given a new data value, I want to approximate its quantile. I also want to simulate data from the distribution of the published data. Is that possible? This situation is common.

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandJune 13, 2014 0

Weather forecasts: deterministic, probabilistic or both?

In 1965's Subterranean Homesick Blues, Bob Dylan taught us: You don't need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows In 1972's You Don't Mess Around with Jim, Jim Croce taught us: You don't spit into the wind By combining these two teachings, one can logically conclude that:

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Advanced Analytics

Rick WicklinJune 13, 2014 0

Geometry, sensitivity, and parameters of the lognormal distribution

Today is my 500th blog post for The DO Loop. I decided to celebrate by doing what I always do: discuss a statistical problem and show how to solve it by writing a program in SAS. Two ways to parameterize the lognormal distribution I recently blogged about the relationship between

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandJune 12, 2014 0

Guest blogger: Len Tashman previews Summer 2014 issue of Foresight

Our tradition from Foresight’s birth in 2005 has been to feature a particular topic of interest and value to practicing forecasters. These feature sections have covered a wide range of areas: the politics of forecasting, how and when to judgmentally adjust statistical forecasts, forecasting support systems, why we should

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Advanced Analytics | Learn SAS

Rick WicklinJune 9, 2014 0

How to generate a grid of points in SAS

In many areas of statistics, it is convenient to be able to easily construct a uniform grid of points. You can use a grid of parameter values to visualize functions and to get a rough feel for how an objective function in an optimization problem depends on the parameters. And

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Advanced Analytics

Rick WicklinJune 4, 2014 0

Simulate lognormal data with specified mean and variance

In my book Simulating Data with SAS, I specify how to generate lognormal data with a shape and scale parameter. The method is simple: you use the RAND function to generate X ~ N(μ, σ), then compute Y = exp(X). The random variable Y is lognormally distributed with parameters μ

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Advanced Analytics | Analytics

Mike GillilandJune 3, 2014 0

Upcoming forecasting conferences

We're entering the busy season for forecasting events, and here is the current calendar: Analytics2014 - Frankfurt The European edition of Analytics2014 kicks off tomorrow in Frankfurt, Germany. Five hundred of the leading thinkers and doers in the analytics profession hook up for two full days of interaction and learning.

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