Tag: statistics

Feed: Planet big data. Author: David Smith. Bayesian Inference is a way of combining information from data with things we think we already know. For example, if we wanted to get an estimate of the mean height of people, we could use our prior knowledge that people are generally between 5 and 6 feet tall to inform the results from the data we collect. If our prior is informative and we don't have much data, this will help us to get a better estimate. If we have a lot of data, even if the prior is wrong (say, our population ... Read More

Feed: Featured Posts - DataViz. Author: Andrei Macsin. Originally posted on Data Science Central “I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians, and I’m not kidding”.  Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google and emeritus professor at the University of California, better known as Berkeley, said on the 5th of August 2009. Today, what Hal Varian said almost seven years ago has been confirmed, as is highlighted in the following graph taken from Google Trends, which gives a good idea of the current attention to figure of the Data Scientist. The Observatory for Big Data Analytics & BI of Politecnico di Milano has been working ... Read More

Feed: Featured Blog Posts - AnalyticBridge. Author: Vernon Sanderson. Probability and physics are helping make even roulette seem ultimately predictable. The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling, is a new book by Adam Kucharski which explains how a mathematician who was studying craps and other dice games eventually led to the development of probability theory, how tiny computers were secretly used in the casino to successfully predict the outcome of the roulette game, and how bots playing poker are making rapid advances. What we thought wasn't predictable is being turned upside down thanks ... Read More

Feed: Latest imported feed items on Analytics Matters. While 75 percent of companies from all sectors and sizes feel they are making the most of their data, in actuality 43 percent “obtain little tangible benefit from their information” and 23 percent “derive no benefit whatsoever.” Why the big disconnect? Many companies make an initial investment in data analytics, but then struggle, waiting months or so until they see a return on their investments. For any company that’s seeking to improve their value through data analysis, the business problem needs to come first. The technology comes later, but when it does, ... Read More

Feed: SAS BlogsRSS – SAS Blogs. Author: Leo Sadovy. Let me make this clear right from the start: I needed to answer 44 of the 62 exam questions correctly to earn my BASE SAS Programmer certification, and I got exactly 44 right.  No margin of error.  I never thought I’d be proud of a 70%, but I’m more than happy to make an exception in this case.  Woot, Woot!! This marks my second SAS certification in as many months, the first being Statistical Business Analyst – Regression and Modeling.  Which brings me to another point on which I must be ... Read More

Feed: Planet big data. Author: David Smith. As Google learned, predicting the spread of influenza, even with mountains of data, is notoriously difficult. Nonetheless, bioinformatician and R user Shirin Glander has created a two-part tutorial about predicting flu deaths with R (part 2 here). The analysis is based on just 136 cases of influenza A H7N9 in China in 2013 (data provided in the outbreaks package) so the intent was not to create a generally predictive model, but by providing all of the R code and graphics Shirin has created a useful example of real-word predictive modeling with R. The tutorial covers loading and cleaning ... Read More

Feed: SQL Server Release Services. Author: Parikshit Savjani. With cloud first strategy, the SQL Product Team has observed great success and adoption of SQL Server 2016 compared to any previous releases. Today, we are even more excited and pleased to announce the availability of SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1 (SP1). With SQL Server 2016 SP1, we are making key improvements allowing a consistent programmability surface area for developers and organizations across SQL Server editions. This will enable you to build advanced applications that scale across editions and cloud as you grow. Developers and application partners can now build to ... Read More

Feed: Planet PostgreSQL. It’s a common misconception that high volume read-write workloads in PostgreSQL inevitably causes database inefficiency. We’ve heard of cases where users encounter slowdowns doing only a few hundred writes per second and turn to systems like Dynamo or Cassandra out of frustration. However PostgreSQL can handle these workloads without a problem as long as it is configured correctly. The problems stem from what’s known as “bloat,” a phenomenon of PostgreSQL and other MVCC databases which causes increased space usage and decreased performance. We’ll see how autovacuum, a tool to combat bloat, is typically misunderstood and misconfigured. By ... Read More

Feed: Databasejournal.com - Feature Database Articles. Author: . Oracle 12.1 provides an interesting performance enhancement, the in-memory column store, that can increase performance by reducing physical I/O load by making tables memory-resident (to simplify the description somewhat). Along with the in-memory access to table data Oracle has introduced a new optimization called "Vector Transformation, including Vector Optimization" for in-memory operations. Even when this new optimization isn't in use there are new code paths to take advantage of this technology. As a result execution plans can change; let's look at an example originally provided by Jonathan Lewis that illustrates this. Two ... Read More

Feed: Featured Blog Posts - Data Science Central. Author: Don Philip Faithful. A theme in my blogs is how the "structure" of data - rather than just the "content" - affects what that data can say and is capable of doing. In particular, I suggest that certain structures tend to reinforce certain contents; this means that a structural imposition can have an effect similar to a contextual imposition. Structure is an interesting conversation because, at first glance, arguably data has none. Structure is something that is attributed to physical things. But data normally has no physical existence - at least ... Read More