Providing students with the background needed for tomorrow’s analytics jobs. By Dursun Delen Students have to understand the basics. You don’t start calculus without a solid understanding of algebra and trigonometry. Image © Sergey Nivens | 123rf.com The analytical skills gap is real and it’s growing. By 2018, the United States could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills, according to a study by the McKinsey Global Institute. Employers will also need an additional 1.5 million managers and analysts with the experience and expertise to use the analysis of big ..read more

In the beginning SAS created procedures and output. The output was formless and void. Then SAS said, “Let there be ODS,” and there was ODS. Customers saw that ODS was good, and SAS separated the computation from the display and management of output. The preceding paragraph oversimplifies the SAS Output Delivery System (ODS), but the truth is that ODS is a powerful feature of SAS. You can use ODS to send SAS tables and graphics to various output destinations, including HTML, PDF, RTF, and PowerPoint. You can control the style and attributes of the output, thus creating a customized report. Ther ..read more

In this article, I clarify the various roles of the data scientist, and how data science compares and overlaps with related fields such as machine learning, deep learning, AI, statistics, IoT, operations research, and applied mathematics. As data science is a broad discipline, I start by describing the different types of data scientists that one may encounter in any business setting: you might even discover that you are a data scientist yourself, without knowing it. As in any scientific discipline, data scientists may borrow techniques from related disciplines, though we have developed our own ..read more

Which is more relevant in the market place ? What do customers ask for ? First of all, are the terms Analytics & Data Science talking about two different things or the same thing ? My blog post was inspired by a discussion on this topic with some of my team members during a recent conference. A lot of millennials think Analytics as an old fashioned way of describing Data Science. On the other hand, a lot of traditional data mining/warehouse people think Data Science as old wine in a newly designed big data bottle. I know this debate not only exists in traditional companie ..read more

I’m currently at IBM’s Amplify event in Tampa, Florida where there’s a huge buzz in the air about all aspects of marketing leadership. Here’s a few snippets of wisdom I’ve garnered today… The priorities of marketing leadership have evolved: from developing a message to driving the P&L; from broadcast to one-to-one; from right brain to whole brain; from a few clean channels to a proliferation of digital channels; from long lead times and planning to real time in the moment; from functional implementations to fundamentally cognitive. In this context, Michelle Peluso (of Gilt, CitGroup and ..read more

Realizing that you can only improve what you measure is a good way to think about KPIs. Often companies want to improve different aspects of their business all at once, but can’t put a finger on what will measure their progress towards overarching company goals. Does it come down to comparing the growth of last year to this year? Or, is it just about the cost of acquiring new customers? If you’re nervously wondering now, “wait, what is my cost per deal”, don’t sweat it. Another growing pain of deciding on KPIs is discovering that there is a lot of missing information. The good news i ..read more