Freakalytics®

Practical Analytics for Better Decisions

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SAS versus R for business analysts

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Over on R4Stats, I replied to Bob Muenchen’s article, Forecast Update: Will 2014 be the Beginning of the End for SAS and SPSS?

Personally, I think SAS is a wonderful application, with my SAS experience starting in SAS programming back in 1989 (mainframes, along with Fortran), SAS Enterprise Guide (I wrote SAS for Dummies, the first two editions with Chris Hemedinger) and SAS Enterprise Miner.  Additionally, I have used JMP, SAS Data Integration Studio, SAS Forecast Studio and several other SAS tools.

On the other hand, I have used R since 2004 on several projects and S (precursor to R) since the 90′s in biopharm. I find R truer to being a modern programming language while SAS is truer to being an analyst programming language. Perhaps I am biased? But, the way I think of attacking problems with data and my typical need to massage the data in a wide range of ways, SAS is simply superior in my opinion. The flow of the language, the ease of readability and the powerful DATA step are still my favorite programming world. However, if I am seeking most any statistical test under the sun, R is clearly superior.

Unfortunately, R doesn’t have a clear, de-facto GUI (graphical user interface) that is well-designed

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Freakalytics Timeline since 2007

Freakalytics_Timeline_Since_2007_Map

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Since 2007, we have traveled 365,000 miles
to help tens of thousands of people via

8 books,
24 conference talks,
47 public trainings,
26 on-site trainings,
5 conference seminars,
15 analytic advisory engagements
and 36 consulting projects.

Click to review our detailed timeline.

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Alteryx Inspire 2013 Tableau Talk

0 Picture This

Download the presentation Picture This! Your Data in Tableau.

Watch my big data talk here and download the example workbooks here (requires Tableau 8 to open).

Attending this conference was a great experience. Based on multiple customer discussions at the conference, Alteryx is a great product for personal data integration, data enrichment and predictive analytics. Some amazing things we saw in Alteryx includes upcoming direct integration with the Tableau Data Engine, interactive location mapping to generate demographic profiles in Tableau, support of Revolution R 3.0 and integration with social data API’s including Yelp, Google + and Facebook.

Here is a screenshot of one of the marketing performance dashboards built in Tableau. It was based on data built with Alteryx. Alteryx was used for data integration, data enrichment and predictive modelling of customer likelihood to respond to future coupon offers. Enrichment included fuzzy matching of customer demographics using Alteryx-bundled 3rd party data sources from Experian.

Tableau 8 Dashboard where are we performing well

If you are looking for a great compliment to Tableau, I recommend that you consider Alteryx.

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Data Driven Conference 2012 and our special discount for attendees

We are having a great time at the Data Driven Conference in Columbus! Our first session was standing room only and we are presenting the same talk a second time at 1:30 in E161.

Interesting questions include “how do you become better at asking the right questions that lead to better analysis” and “how do you communicate with IT to get better data”?

To buy The Accidental Analyst directly from us at the special attendee discount, please visit www.AccidentalAnalyst.com/ddc and place your order before this Thursday.

Here is our infographic that we created

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Webcast: “Big Data” on your laptop, fast, informative and at your command

NOTE: This fun review of “big data” was inspired by a recent presentation I gave on behalf of Tableau Software at the Big Data Conference in Chicago. You can find the 1st part of this 3 part webcast here, “Performance to Cost Index & my personal history with “Big Data” and Part 2 here, “Big Data” in US History, Exploring the 1790 US Census. This part of the big data series is free, just subscribe or sign in below.

In this presentation, I share an example of working with big data stored on my laptop and the entire analysis happens without any type of connection to remote servers or databases. My analysis uses two tables of interest, the first has 216 million records, over ten years of airline ticket pricing in the US while the second table has 72 million records of US airlines performance data extracted from Hadoop. In the demonstration, which uses currently available technologies, we will quickly explore and analyze this data for interesting trends and patterns.

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Free Webcast: “Big Data” in US History, Exploring the 1790 US Census

NOTE: This fun review of “big data” was inspired by a recent presentation I gave on behalf of Tableau Software at the Big Data Conference in Chicago. You can find the 1st part of this 3 part webcast here, “Performance to Cost Index & my personal history with “Big Data”. Part 3 is here, “Big Data” on your laptop, fast, informative and at your command.

In this presentation, I share a review of the original big data in US history, the 1790 US Census. Some surprises are found along the way, including data quality issues in the Census reports and a surprising

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Free Webcast: Performance to Cost Index & my personal history with “Big Data”

NOTE: This fun review of “big data” was inspired by a recent presentation I gave on behalf of Tableau Software at the Big Data Conference in Chicago. You can find the 2nd part of this 3 part webcast here, ““Big Data” in US History, Exploring the 1790 US Census”. Part 3 is here, “Big Data” on your laptop, fast, informative and at your command.

Many people ask me, what is “big data”?  For most of them, the right answer is that big data is any data that is difficult to use or understand (yes, I know the official, “correct” answers, which often vary and typically include topics like Hadoop and Cloudera.)

In this presentation, I share my experience with the Commodore 64, the PS/2, DEC Stations, VAX servers, Solaris Servers, PC’s and a MacBook Pro.  Products and languages covered include BASIC, FORTRAN, SAS, Oracle, Teradata and Tableau.

It is truly astonishing

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Create data-driven groups in Tableau with data blending (VLookup)

Similar to VLookup functionality in Excel, you can use a second data source to dynamically create a new group in a separate Tableau data source. Just follow along with this example to create one.

1. Open the Tableau included sample data source, Sample – Superstore Sales (Excel)

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2. Map Sales by State: CTRL-Click on State and then on Sales.  Click Show Me and select Symbol Maps.  A map will appear.

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3. Suppose you would like to label each state by region and/or filter by region.  If you already have a text file, Excel spreadsheet or database table with region data, you can use this for an Excel VLookup type of functionality.  The example

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