The 2014 Forum will hold several half day Pre-Forum seminars on Sunday, November 9th, 2014, as well as Post-Forum seminars on Wednesday, November 12th. Attendees will have an opportunity to develop and enrich their SAS knowledge by attending a morning and/or afternoon seminar from the list below. Please note that a separate $125 per seminar fee applies to all pre conference training.
Programming Essentials Using SAS® Enterprise Guide®
Scheduled Time: Sunday, November 9, 2014 – 8:30am-12:30pm
Intended Audience: SAS Programmers and End Users
Instructor: Kirk Lafler
This course teaches the power of the graphical user interface (GUI) features found in SAS® Enterprise Guide (EG). Acquire a working knowledge of the GUI front-end interface along with the built-in wizards to access and perform a variety of input data types; data transformations; reporting and analytical tasks; subset, order, group, and summarize data; join (or merge) tables together; export results to Excel, Word, HTML, and PDF; and organize, view and manage projects, code, and application-generated flow diagrams.
Attendees learn how to use EG’s GUI front-end interface to construct and execute programs using the SAS System; read and process text, ASCII, comma- and tab-delimited, and Excel data; format existing variables and create new calculated variables; create temporary and permanent SAS data sets; subset, order and group data; create detail, summary, tabular and statistical reports; perform conditional programming logic; manipulate numeric and character data; combine data using concatenation, match-merging (or joining) techniques; and manage SAS data sets and projects for added power and flexibility.
Instructor Bio: Kirk Paul Lafler is consultant and founder of Software Intelligence Corporation and has been programming in SAS since 1979. He is a SAS Certified Professional, application developer, programmer, data scientist and provider of IT consulting services and training to SAS users around the world. As an author of six books including Google Search Complete! (Odyssey Press. 2014), PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS, Second Edition (SAS Institute. 2013) and PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS (SAS Institute. 2004), he has written more than five hundred papers and articles, been an Invited speaker at four hundred-plus SAS International, regional, special-interest, local, and in-house user group conferences/meetings, and is the recipient of 23 “Best” contributed paper, hands-on workshop (HOW), and poster awards. His popular SAS Tips column, “Kirk’s Korner of Quick and Simple Tips”, appears regularly in several SAS User Group newsletters and Websites, and his fun-filled SASword Puzzles are featured in SAScommunity.org and many SAS Newsletters.
PROC SQL Programming: The Basics and Beyond
Scheduled Time: Sunday, November 9, 2014 – 1:00am-5:00pm
Intended Audience: All SAS and SQL users
Instructor: Kirk Lafler
This course teaches SAS users core concepts and features about accessing data stored in SAS datasets. Attendees learn how to use PROC SQL to access data; accomplish essential programming tasks including retrieving, subsetting, ordering, and grouping data; construct logic scenarios with case expressions; explore one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many data relationships; understand the similarities and differences between DATA step merges and joins; create complex queries using inner and outer join constructs as well as with set operators; use summary (statistical) functions to aggregate data; create new tables; produce “quality” looking output using PROC SQL options with Output Delivery System (ODS); and interface PROC SQL with the macro facility to create single-value and multi-value (list) macro variables.
Instructor Bio: Kirk Paul Lafler is consultant and founder of Software Intelligence Corporation and has been programming in SAS since 1979. He is a SAS Certified Professional, application developer, programmer, data scientist and provider of IT consulting services and training to SAS users around the world. As an author of six books including Google Search Complete! (Odyssey Press. 2014), PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS, Second Edition (SAS Institute. 2013) and PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS (SAS Institute. 2004), he has written more than five hundred papers and articles, been an Invited speaker at four hundred-plus SAS International, regional, special-interest, local, and in-house user group conferences/meetings, and is the recipient of 23 “Best” contributed paper, hands-on workshop (HOW), and poster awards. His popular SAS Tips column, “Kirk’s Korner of Quick and Simple Tips”, appears regularly in several SAS User Group newsletters and Websites, and his fun-filled SASword Puzzles are featured in SAScommunity.org and many SAS Newsletters.
Introduction to Text Analytics using SAS Text Miner
Scheduled Time: Wednesday, November 12, 2014 – 8:00 pm – Noon
Intended Audience: Professionals interested in learning more about Text Analytics and how it’s done in SAS Text Miner.
Instructor: Edward Jones, PhD, Texas A&M University and Texas A&M Statistical Services, LP
Text analytics is a new, interdisciplinary area that blends methodology from statistics, computer science, and natural language processing. Understanding the terminology and general approach to the statistical analysis of large collections of text data is increasingly critical to connecting statisticians to important big data problems.
Text analytics is rapidly evolving as the available data and applications change. In the beginning, text analytics involved the analysis of simple word counts, now with available software for natural language processing, text analytics is challenged with the analysis of contextual information.
This half-day workshop explores the terminology, common methodology and SAS for analysis of large, complex text data.
- Introduction to Text Analytics – History, Terminology and Linguistic Concepts
- Introduction to SAS® Enterprise Miner™ and SAS® Text Miner
- Sentiment and Opinion Analysis using SAS® Text Miner
- Survey Analysis – Integrating Structured and Unstructured Data Analytics
Instructor Bio: Dr. Jones has a PhD degree Statistics from Virginia Tech and a B.S. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University – Commerce. He has over 10 years in the development of statistical and data mining software for companies in Silicon Valley and Rogue Wave Software. He designed and wrote the data mining software incorporated in IMSL, the International Mathematical and Statistics Library.
Currently, he teaches data mining and analytics at Texas A&M University. He also consults with companies on business analytics and quality assurance. He is also co-founder and Vice President of Texas A&M Statistical Services.
Integrating SAS Business Intelligence (BI) Tools – Building Financial Analytic Content as an Example
Scheduled Time: Wednesday, November 12, 2014 – 1:00pm – 5:00pm
Intended Audience: This workshop will appeal to two audiences: SAS Business Intelligence users interested in learning more about how to integrate the suite of tools in the SAS Business Intelligence Suite and financial professionals interested in using SAS for financial reporting.
Instructor: Alejandro Farias, Budget Analyst, Texas Parks and Wildlife
This half day seminar explains the step by step methodology that was created as an alternative to improve the overall performance of some Texas Parks and Wildlife Department SAS financial reports. Originally, financial reports were surfaced in SAS® Enterprise Guide and SAS® Add-In for Microsoft Office with SAS® Information Maps built on Oracle tables and views. This method had been an improvement over our existing Oracle financial reporting tools, however we identified several areas where we could continue to improve performance and add new analytic content not previously available on the core Oracle tables and views.
Documentation is included to design, integrate and automate a Business Intelligence (BI) financial report using SAS® Enterprise Guide and SAS® OLAP Cube Studio.
Topics covered in the half day seminar include:
· Organizing and Targeting Issues
· Understanding the Data
· Report Design
· Working with SAS Enterprise Guide Query Builder
o Selecting Tables in Enterprise Guide
o Table Relationships in Enterprise Guide
o Selecting Data Items in Enterprise Guide
o Creating Computed Columns
o Filtering Data
· Modifying PROC SQL to Create Tables
· Creating an OLAP Cube
· Modifying the PROC OLAP Statement
· Using Windows Task Scheduler to Schedule Project
Instructor Bio: Alejandro Farias is a Financial Analyst in the Planning, Analysis, and Reporting section in the Administrative Resources Division at Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD). He has a B.S. in Agricultural Economics from Texas A&M University. Over the last 4 years, Mr. Farias has assisted in the design, architecture and implementation of SAS Business Intelligence (BI) tools and is experienced with data techniques for extracting, cleaning, conforming and delivering data to end-users. Mr. Farias was awarded the 2013 Employee Recognition Award for Innovation at TPWD for his work on developing new methods for financial analytics, reporting and training.
