About the Scenario in This Book

The first seven chapters describe an extended example that is intended to familiarize you with SAS Text Miner. Each topic builds on the previous topic, so you must work through these chapters in sequence. Several key components of the SAS Text Miner process flow diagram are covered. In this step-by-step example, you learn to do basic tasks in SAS Text Miner, such as creating a project and building a process flow diagram. In your diagram, you perform tasks such as accessing data, preparing the data, building multiple predictive models using text variables, and comparing the models. The extended example in this book is designed to be used in conjunction with SAS Text Miner software. The remaining chapters focus on each of the SAS Text Miner nodes, and provide additional information that you might find useful for your text mining analysis.

The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data is publicly available from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Anyone can download this data in comma-separated value (CSV) format from http://vaers.hhs.gov. There are separate CSV files for every year since the U.S. started collecting the data in 1990. This data is collected from myriad sources, but most reports come from vaccine manufacturers and health care providers. Providers are required to report any contraindicated events for a vaccine or any very serious complications. In the context of a vaccine, a contraindication event would be a condition or a factor that increases the risk of using the vaccine.

See the following in the Getting Started Examples zip file:

The following figure shows the first 8 columns in the first 10 rows in a table of VAERS data. Included is a unique identifier, the state of residence, and the recipient's age. Additional columns (not in the following figure) include an unstructured text string SYMPTOM_TEXT that contains the reported problem, specific symptoms, and a symptom counter.

As you go through this example, imagine you are a researcher trying to discover what information is contained within this data set. You also want to know how you can use it to better understand the adverse reactions that children and adults are experiencing from their vaccination shots. These adverse reactions might be caused by one or more of the vaccinations that they are given, or they might be induced by an improper procedure from the administering lab (for example, a non-sanitized needle). Some of them will be totally unrelated. For example, perhaps someone happened to get a cold just after receiving a flu vaccine and reported it. You might want to investigate serious reactions that required a hospital stay or caused a lifetime disability or death.

When you are finished with this example, your process flow diagram should resemble the one shown here: