You can extend your educational opportunities in a number of ways at SAS Global Forum 2011. Sign up to participate in a Pre-Conference Seminar or Statistical Tutorial on Monnday, arrive earlier for SAS Training Courses, or stay for the Post-Conference Seminar.

Pre-Conference Seminars & Statistical Tutorials

Monday, April 4
Seminars and Statistical Tutorials are extra-fee events costing $155 each and include relevant handouts. The Statistical Tutorials are taught by SAS R&D staff.

These extra-fee items are only available as additions to a conference registration. Package 3 includes your choice of one. EPTO units may not be used to pay for these items.

Details:

8:00 - 11:30 a.m.

An Introduction to Excel VBA for SAS® Programmers

Instructor: Peter Eberhardt, Fernwood Consulting Group, Inc.

As SAS programmers and analysts we are comfortable and at home in an environment where we have programs and commands that automate our processing. The data changes - we simply rerun our code to produce consistent results. However, when we have to work with data in Excel - whether "cleaning up" worksheets so they can be imported by SAS, or "dressing up" worksheets for management review - many SAS programmers are operating in a manual, nonreplicable environment. The data changes - we have to repeat all of the manual steps again. Needless to say this is not only time-consuming, but also error-prone.

In this workshop you will learn how to use the programming language and environment that comes with Excel: Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). VBA is essentially a specialized subset of the Microsoft Visual Basic (VB) programming language.

The workshop will use Excel 2007 VBA for the examples, but all of the content will be applicable to earlier versions of Excel.

   




How to Become a Top SAS® Programmer

Instructor: Michael Raithel, Westat

Whether you are a student or a statistician, a programmer or a business analyst, this groundbreaking new class will show you how to streamline and revitalize your career to become a top SAS performer in your organization.

This class features lectures, class discussions, and paper-and-pen exercises that focus on reinforcing your own real-world objectives for setting the goals that will move your SAS programming career forward. The course details the key SAS programming fundamentals that you should master, strategies for becoming the go-to SAS person in your organization, ways to become involved and recognized in the greater SAS community, how to exploit the best sources of SAS information to make them work for you, and more. You will leave the class with a written set of objectives and the knowledge of how to implement them, based on the course material. Armed with the information from this course, your set of goals and objectives, and your own ambition, there are no limits to how far you can go with your SAS programming career.

   


Introduction to PROC SQL for New Users

Instructor: Kirk Lafler, Software Intelligence Corporation

Structured Query Language (SQL) is a universal database language that allows users to access data stored in relational databases or tables. This seminar presents SAS users with core concepts and features on using PROC SQL to access data stored in SAS data sets (or tables). Attendees learn PROC SQL syntax; how to retrieve, subset, order and group data; create tables and views; define, access and manipulate data; produce quality-looking output with PROC SQL options and Output Delivery System (ODS); use summary (statistical) functions to aggregate data; understand the difference between DATA step merges and joins; construct inner and outer joins; and apply query performance techniques and strategies.

   




XML for the SAS® Programmer

Instructor: Frederick Pratter, Destiny

XML (the Extensible Markup Language) is an open standard for the definition, transmission, validation and interpretation of data. SAS 9.2 includes a number of useful tools for creating and parsing XML data. These include: the XML libname engine, used to import and export documents in XML format into or from a SAS data set, optionally using an XMLMap; the XML Mapper application, a graphical interface to analyze the structure of an XML document or an XML schema and generate basic XML syntax for the XMLMap; and the ODS Markup output destination, to create XML from SAS output. The seminar will also discuss XHTML and how to create it using ODS.

   

8:00 - 10:00 a.m.

Creating Statistical Graphics with ODS in SAS®

Instructor: Warren Kuhfeld, SAS

Effective graphics are indispensable in modern statistical analysis. SAS 9.2 provides ODS Graphics, new functionality used by statistical procedures to create statistical graphics as automatically as they create tables. ODS Graphics is also used by new SAS/GRAPH® procedures that are designed for graphical exploration of data. This tutorial is intended for statistical users and covers the use of ODS Graphics from start to finish in statistical analysis. You will learn how to:

• Request graphs created by statistical procedures.
• Use the new SGPLOT, SGPANEL, SGSCATTER and SGRENDER procedures in SAS/GRAPH to create customized graphs.
• Access and manage your graphs for inclusion in Web pages, papers and presentations.
• Modify graph styles (colors, fonts and general appearance).
• Make immediate changes to your graphs using a point-and-click editor.
• Make permanent changes to your graphs with template changes.
• Specify other options related to ODS Graphics.

   




Multiple Comparisons Methods in SAS/STAT® Software

Instructors: Randy Tobias, SAS (Presenting) and Peter Westfall, Texas Tech University

Real data analysis almost always addresses multiple questions, making methods of adjusting inferences for multiplicity of critical importance in science, technology, business and many other fields. SAS/STAT software has long been a leader in providing powerful and up-to-date methods for comparing group means. Moreover, these methods have been extended far beyond the usual linear models, especially with the advent of SAS/STAT 9.22, to generalized linear models, mixed models, survival data and survey analysis.

This tutorial will be founded on a common framework for performing inferences on multiple hypotheses, a framework that applies to all of the above areas. We will show how this framework covers familiar techniques like Bonferroni corrections and Dunnett's test. We will also show how you can get newer and more powerful inferences within this framework with statements and options that are common to many procedures in SAS 9.22. Examples will come from many different fields, from epidemiology to industrial experimentation. We will closely follow material in the upcoming second edition of the book Multiple Comparisons and Multiple Tests Using SAS.

   

10:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Data Simulation for Evaluating Statistical Methods in SAS®

Instructor: Rick Wicklin, SAS

To assess statistical techniques, you often need to create data with known properties, both random and nonrandom. This workshop presents techniques for using the DATA step and SAS/IML® software to simulate data.

You will learn to simulate:

• Data from common univariate and multivariate distributions, including skewed and heavy-tailed distributions.
• Data from a mixture of distributions.
• Data with known properties such as a specific covariance structure or a known regression structure.

You will learn to use simulated data to evaluate:

• The performance of algorithms.
• The robustness of statistics.
• The coverage probabilities of approximate confidence intervals.

This workshop is intended for researchers and practicing statisticians.

   

An Introductory Tutorial on Mixed Models

Instructor: Funda Gunes, SAS

Mixed models analysis is one of the cornerstones of modern statistics. It extends the general linear model for independent and equivariant data by allowing a more flexible covariance for the error term. Using mixed models, you can fit models to a variety of data that follow the normal distribution, including repeated measurements and those from a randomized block design. This tutorial introduces the basics of mixed models methodology and shows how to analyze linear mixed models with the MIXED procedure, the SAS/STAT® flagship procedure for mixed modeling. Numerous examples are used to illustrate typical applications of the MIXED procedure. This tutorial also includes an overview of other mixed modeling procedures in SAS, giving a brief introduction to analyzing generalized linear models with the GLIMMIX procedure and discussing the scenarios in which you would use the HPMIXED and NLMIXED procedures.

Prerequisites are a working knowledge of the general linear model and some basic matrix algebra.

   

Afternoon Seminars

1:00 - 4:00 p.m.

Best Practices in Base SAS® Coding

Instructor: Kent Reeve, SAS

How you write your SAS code can have a tremendous impact on the use of computer and programmer resources. In this seminar, we'll look at techniques you should use whenever you write SAS code to minimize the use of CPU, I/O, memory, disk space, networking and programmer resources. We'll examine SAS coding techniques that produce identical results and compare the computer resource usage of each technique. We'll also look at some "tricks of the trade" to minimize code maintenance.

   


Fear SAS® Graphs No More!

Instructor: Marty Hultgren, SAS

Admit it, you have a juicy little secret. You love writing SAS code; well, everything except PROC GCHART that is! Have you seen the size of the documentation for that? So you sneak away to Excel, manually input the number from PROC MEANS/SUMMARY, print it off and hope no one is the wiser. And then do it all over again next month with new numbers. I know, I've been there (and I work for SAS ... shhh!!!). This seminar will show you how to break those chains and use SAS® Enterprise Guide® as an easy point-and-click interface to create the graph. This also makes the process repeatable AND you can still make use of your wonderful SAS programming skills to customize titles and footnotes.

   


The Platform for SAS Business Analytics: Overview

Instructor: Christine Vitron, SAS

Do you have the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform but would like to have a better understanding of the security model?

This seminar introduces you to the concepts of authentication and authorization in the SAS enterprise intelligence environment. You will learn about the use of external authentication providers to validate user identities, support for single sign-on from SAS applications to other computing resources, and the use of a metadata-based authorization facility that makes decisions about who can take which actions on which resource.

   


Understanding Why Your Macros Don't Work

Instructor: Michelle Buchecker, SAS

This brain-teasing seminar will discuss the behind-the-scenes workings of the macro facility and explain why macro variables you thought would resolve don't, why you need an extra period or four after a macro variable reference, why you care about the difference between %LET and CALL SYMPUT, and what all those extra ampersands are for. Some macro knowledge is recommended for those attending this seminar.

   

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