We’re excited about attending this year’s SAS Global Forum, which includes eight sessions in the Statistics and Data Analysis section, two sessions in the Data Mining and Text Analytics section, and one session in the Operations Research section.  There are two keynote speakers for the Statistics section: Paul Allison, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about handling missing data by maximum likelihood, and Sharon Lohr, Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Arizona State University, talks about using SAS software for the design, analysis, and visualization of complex surveys.

Tyler Smith of National University, co-chair of the Statistics and Data Analysis section along with Racheal Biel of USAA, thinks they have a great line-up. “This year’s section will present timely and relevant SAS and statistical solutions to your  problems. Concurrent sessions allow us to provide more choices and options for our attendees.”

And don’t forget, this marks the 12th anniversary of the SAS Global Forum Children's Book Drive. So if you are attending, please think about bringing a  book for a kid in a local shelter or community organization.

Some of you might have noticed that the "Fixed" field in SAS Notes now includes the value 12.1.
It’s not a typo! Beginning with the next release, which is targeted for the third quarter of 2012, the analytical products switch to a new numbering scheme, and the first value will be 12.1.  Previously most of these products were released only with a new release of Base SAS®, and that’s no longer the case. In addition, these products are being released on a more frequent schedule, and we wanted to call attention to that. So, we decided to start with the value 12.1, and the next new release number for these products will be 13.1.

Closer to release time, you’ll see much more information on support.sas.com.

Meta-analysis is an important technique that combines information from different studies. Assuming that you have no prior information for thinking that any particular study is different from another study, you can treat Bayesian meta-analysis as a hierarchical model.  This example uses the MCMC procedure to illustrate two applications of hierarchical modeling  for meta-analysis of medical studies. 

Users often want to modify the survival plots from the LIFETEST procedure. The changes range from changing the plot title to modifying the layout to adding summary statistics. The chapter "Statistical Graphics Using ODS" in the SAS/STAT Users Guide includes an example about customizing survival plots that shows you how to modify the PROC LIFETEST template to make such modifications. It also introduces a macro-ized version of the template that can be more convenient to modify.

Find out how to extend the models available in SAS High-Performance Forecasting by creating custom repositories, taking advantage of external models, and adding user-defined models.

Watch this video to learn about the highlights of SAS/ETS 9.3 . Learn about the new COPULA procedure for using copulas to fit multivariate distributions from a given sample data set, the new SSM procedure for state space modeling when the data might be irregularly spaced, and the newly production SEVERITY procedure for fitting probability distributions for the severity or magnitude of random events. Also discussed also are numerous enhancements to existing procedures.

SAS will be at the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research in Huntington Beach, CA, from April 15 to April 17.  SAS staff will teach pre-conference workshops as well as demo software.  Manoj Chari is the co-chair of tracks on The Analytics Process and Marketing Analytics, respectively, and Mike Gilliland is the co-chair of a track on Supply Chain Management. Aiman Zeid will speak for the Soft Skills for Analysts track.  A new book, SAS/OR User’s Guide:  Mathematical Programming Examples, will be available in draft form at our exhibition booth.

The following is a list of tutorials scheduled for SAS Global Forum 2012.

• Introduction to Bayesian Analysis Using SAS Software (Maura Stokes)
• Creating Statistical Graphics with ODS in SAS (Warren Kuhfeld)
• Data Simulation for Evaluating Statistical Methods in SAS (Rick Wicklin)
• SAS Procedures for Analyzing Survey Data  (Pushpal Mukhopadhyay)

The LIFETEST procedure provides k-sample stratified tests with the GROUP= option in the STRATA statement.  Learn exactly what null hypothesis is being tested.