SAS Enterprise Guide Papers A-Z

A
Session 0689-2017:
A Practical Guide to Getting Started with Propensity Scores
This presentation gives you the tools to begin using propensity scoring in SAS® to answer research questions involving observational data. It is for both those attendees who have never used propensity scores and those who have a basic understanding of propensity scores but are unsure how to begin using them in SAS. It provides a brief introduction to the concept of propensity scores, and then turns its attention to giving you the tips and resources you need to get started. The presentation walks you through how the code in the book 'Analysis of Observational Health Care Data Using SAS®', which was published by SAS Institute, is used to answer how a particular health care intervention impacted a health care outcome. It details how propensity scores are created and how propensity score matching is used to balance covariates between treated and untreated observations. With this case study in hand, you will feel confident that you have the tools necessary to begin answering some of your own research questions using propensity scores.
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Thomas Gant, Kaiser Permanente
Session 1052-2017:
An Investigation into Big Data Analytics Applied to Insurance
Data is generated every second. The term big data refers to the volume, variety, and velocity of data that is being produced. Now woven into every sector, its size and complexity has left organizations faced with difficulties in being able to create, manipulate, and manage big data. This research identifies and reviews a range of big data techniques within SAS®, highlighting the fundamental opportunities that SAS provides for overcoming a variety of business challenges. Insurance is a data-dependent industry. This research focuses on understanding what SAS can offer to insurance companies and how it could interact with existing customer databases and online, user-generated content. A range of data sources have been identified for this purpose. The research demonstrates how models can be built based on existing relationships found in past data and then used to identify prospective customers. Principal component analysis, cluster analysis, and neural networks are all considered. You will learn how these techniques can be used to help capture valuable insight, create firm relationships, and support customer feedback. Whether it is prescriptive, predictive, descriptive, or diagnostic analytics, harnessing big data can add background and depth, providing insurance companies with a more complete story. You will see that you can reduce the complexity and dimensionality of data, provide actionable intelligence, and essentially make more informed business decisions.
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Rebecca Peters, University of South Wales
Penny Holborn, University of South Wales
Session SAS0339-2017:
An Oasis of Serenity in a Sea of Chaos: Automating the Management of Your UNIX/Linux Multi-tiered SAS® Services
UNIX and Linux SAS® administrators, have you ever been greeted by one of these statements as you walk into the office before you have gotten your first cup of coffee? Power outage! SAS servers are down. I cannot access my reports. Have you frantically tried to restart the SAS servers to avoid loss of productivity and missed one of the steps in the process, causing further delays while other work continues to pile up? If you have had this experience, you understand the benefit to be gained from a utility that automates the management of these multi-tiered deployments. Until recently, there was no method for automatically starting and stopping multi-tiered services in an orchestrated fashion. Instead, you had to use time-consuming manual procedures to manage SAS services. These procedures were also prone to human error, which could result in corrupted services and additional time lost, debugging and resolving issues injected by this process. To address this challenge, SAS Technical Support created the SAS Local Services Management (SAS_lsm) utility, which provides automated, orderly management of your SAS® multi-tiered deployments. The intent of this paper is to demonstrate the deployment and usage of the SAS_lsm utility. Now, go grab a coffee, and let's see how SAS_lsm can make life less chaotic.
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Clifford Meyers, SAS
Session 1473-2017:
Analysis of the Disparity of the “Haves” and “Have-Nots” in the United States
A major issue in America today is the growing gap between the rich and the poor. Even though the basic concept has entered the public consciousness, the effects of highly concentrated wealth are hotly debated and poorly understood by the general public. The goal of this paper is to get a fair picture of the wealth gap and its ill effects on American society. Before visualizing the financial gap, an exploration and descriptive analysis is carried out. By considering the data (gross annual income, taxable income, and taxes paid), which is available on the website of United States Census Bureau, we try to find out the actual spending capacity of the people in America. We visualize the financial gap on the basis of the spending capacity. With the help of this analysis we try to answer the following questions. Why is it important to have a fair idea of this gap? At what rate is the average wealth of the American population increasing? How does it affect the tax system? Insights generated from answering these questions will be used for further analysis.
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Gaurang Margaj, Oklahoma State University
Tejaswi Jha, Oklahoma State University
Tejashree Pande, University of Nebraska Omaha
Session 1260-2017:
Analyzing the Effect of Weather on Uber Ridership
Uber has changed the face of taxi ridership, making it more convenient and comfortable for riders. But, there are times when customers are dissatisfied because of a shortage of Uber vehicles, which ultimately leads to Uber surge pricing. It's a very difficult task to forecast the number of riders at different locations in a city at different points in time. This gets more complicated with changes in weather. In this paper, we attempt to estimate the number of trips per borough on a daily basis in New York City. We add an exogenous factor weather to this analysis to see how it impacts the changes in the number of trips. We fetched six months worth of data (approximately 9.7 million records) of Uber rides in New York City ranging from January 2015 to June 2015 from GitHub. We gathered weather data (about 3.5 million records) for New York City for the same period from the National Climatic Data Center. We analyzed Uber data and weather data together to estimate the change in the number of trips per borough due to changing weather conditions. We built a model to predict the number of trips per day for a one-week-ahead forecast for each borough of New York City. As part of a further analysis, we got the number of trips on a particular day for each borough. Using time series analysis, we forecast the number of trips that might be required in the near future (probably one week).
Read the paper (PDF) | View the e-poster or slides (PDF)
Anusha Mamillapalli, Oklahoma State University
Singdha Gutha, Oklahoma State University
Session SAS0297-2017:
Automating Gorgeous Executive-Level Presentations Using SAS® Office Analytics
A lot of time and effort goes into creating presentations or dashboards for the purposes of management business reviews. Data for the presentation is produced from a variety of tools, and the output is cut and pasted into Microsoft PowerPoint or Microsoft Excel. Time is spent not only on the data preparation and reporting, but also on the finishing and touching up of these presentations. In previous years, SAS® Global Forum authors have described the automation capabilities of SAS® and Microsoft Office. The default look and feel of SAS output in Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Excel is not always adequate for the more polished requirement of an executive presentation. This paper focuses on how to combine the capabilities of SAS® Enterprise Guide®, SAS® Visual Analytics, and Microsoft PowerPoint into a finished, professional presentation. We will build and automate a beautiful finished end product that can be refreshed by anyone with the click of a mouse.
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Dwight Fowler, SAS
B
Session 0929-2017:
Building a Member-Centric World from a Transactional Data Galaxy
Health insurers have terabytes of transactional data. However, transactional data does not tell a member-level story. Humana Inc. is often faced with requirements for tagging (identifying) members with various clinical conditions such as diabetes, depression, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and various member-level utilization metrics. For example, Consumer Health Tags are built to identify the condition (that is, diabetes, hypertension, and so on) and to estimate the intensity of the disease using medical and pharmacy administrative claims data. This case study takes you on an analytics journey from the initial problem diagnosis and analytics solution using SAS®.
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Brian Mitchell, Humana Inc.
C
Session 1288-2017:
Creating a Departmental Standard SAS® Enterprise Guide® Template
This presentation describes an ongoing effort to standardize and simplify SAS® coding across a rapidly growing analytics team in the health care industry. The number of SAS analysts in Kaiser Permanente's Data and Information Management Enhancement (DIME) department has nearly doubled in the past two years, going from approximately 20 to 40 analysts. The level of experience and technical skill varies greatly within the department. Analysts are required to provide quick turn-around on a large volume of analytical requests in this dynamic and high-demand environment. An effort was initiated in 2016 to create a SAS® Enterprise Guide® Template to standardize and simplify SAS coding across the department. The SAS Enterprise Guide® template is designed to be a standard project file containing predefined code shells and examples that can be used as a basis for all new SAS Enterprise Guide® projects. The primary goals of the template are to: 1) Effectively onboard new analysts to department standards; 2) Increase the efficiency of SAS development; 3) Bring consistency to how SAS is used; and 4) Simplify the transitioning of SAS jobs to the department's Production Support team. This presentation focuses on the process in which the template was initiated, drafted, and socialized across a large and diverse team of SAS analysts. It also highlights plans for ongoing maintenance of and improvements to the original template.
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Amanda Pasch, Kaiser Permanente
Chris Koppenhafer, Kaiser Permanente
D
Session 0778-2017:
Differentiate Effects from the Noise of Promotional Marketing Campaigns
In highly competitive markets, the response rates to economically reasonable marketing campaigns are as low as a few percentage points or less. In that case, the direct measure of the delta between the average key performance indicators (KPIs) of the treated and control groups is heavily 'contaminated' by non-responders. This paper focuses on measuring promotional marketing campaigns with two properties: (1) price discounts or other benefits, which are changing profitability of the targeted group for at least the promotion periods, and (2) impact of self-responders. The paper addresses the decomposition of the KPI measurement between responders and non-responders for both groups. Assuming that customers who rejected promotional offers will not change their behavior and that non-responders of both treated and control groups are not biased, the delta of the average KPIs for non-responders should be equal to zero. In practice, this component might be significantly deviated from zero. It might be caused by an initial nonzero delta of KPI values despite a random split between groups or by existence of outliers, especially for non-balanced campaigns. In order to address the deviation of the delta from zero, it might require running additional statistical tests comparing not just the means but the distributions of KPIs as well. The decomposition of the measurement between responders and non-responders for both groups can then be used in differential modeling.
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Alex Glushkovsky, BMO Financial Group
Matthew Fabian, BMO Financial Group
Session 0155-2017:
Distances: Let SAS® Do the Heavy Lifting
SAS® has a very efficient and powerful way to get distances between an event and a customer. Using the tables and code located at http://support.sas.com/rnd/datavisualization/mapsonline/html/geocode.html#street, you can load latitude and longitude to addresses that you have for your events and customers. Once you have the tables downloaded from SAS, and you have run the code to get them into SAS data sets, this paper helps guide you through the rest using PROC GEOCODE and the GEODIST function. This can help you determine to whom to market an event. And, you can see how far a client is from one of your facilities.
Read the paper (PDF) | View the e-poster or slides (PDF)
Jason O'Day, US Bank
E
Session 0809-2017:
Easing into Data Exploration, Reporting, and Analytics Using SAS® Enterprise Guide®
Whether you have been programming in SAS® for years, or you are new to it, or you have dabbled with SAS® Enterprise Guide® before, this hands-on workshop sheds some light on the depth, breadth, and power of the SAS Enterprise Guide environment. With all the demands on your time, you need powerful tools that are easy to learn and that deliver end-to-end support for your data exploration, reporting, and analytics needs. Included in this workshop are data exploration tools; formatting code (cleaning up after your coworkers); enhanced programming environment (and how to calm it down); easily creating reports and graphics; producing the output formats you need (XLS, PDF, RTF, HTML); workspace layout; and productivity tips. This workshop uses SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1, but most of the content is applicable to earlier versions.
Read the paper (PDF) | Download the data file (ZIP)
Marje Fecht
Session 0986-2017:
Estimation of Student Growth Percentile Using SAS® Procedures
Student growth percentile (SGP) is one of the most widely used score metrics for measuring a student's academic growth. Using longitudinal data, SGP describes a student's growth as the relative standing among students who had a similar level of academic achievement in previous years. Although several models for SGP estimation have been introduced, and some models have been implemented with R, no studies have yet described using SAS®. As a result, this research describes various types of SGP models and demonstrates how practitioners can use SAS procedures to fit these models. Specifically, this study covers three types of statistical models for SGP: 1) quantile regression-based model 2) conditional cumulative density function-based model 3) multidimensional item response theory-based model. Each of the three models partly uses procedures in SAS, such as PROC QUANTREG, PROC LOGISTIC, PROC TRANSREG, PROC IRT, or PROC MCMC, for its computation. The program code is illustrated using a simulated longitudinal data set over two consecutive years, which is generated by SAS/IML®. In addition, the interpretation of the estimation results and the advantages and disadvantages of implementing these three approaches in SAS are discussed.
View the e-poster or slides (PDF)
Hongwook Suh, ACT
Robert Ankenmann, The University of Iowa
Session 1308-2017:
Exploration of Information Technology-Related Barriers Affecting Rural Primary Care Clinics
With an aim to improve rural healthcare, Oklahoma State University (OSU) Center for Health Systems Innovation (CHSI) conducted a study with primary care clinics (n=35) in rural Oklahoma to identify possible impediments to clinic workflows. The study entailed semi-structured personal interviews (n=241) and administered an online survey using an iPad (n=190). Respondents encompassed all consenting clinic constituents (physicians, nurses, practice managers, schedulers). Quantitative data from surveys revealed that electronic medical records (EMRs) are well accepted and contributed to increasing workflow efficiency. However, the qualitative data from interviews reveals that there are IT-related barriers like Internet connectivity, hardware problems, and inefficiencies in information systems. Interview responses identified six IT-related response categories (computer, connectivity, EMR-related, fax, paperwork, and phone calls) that routinely affect clinic workflow. These categories together account for more than 50% of all the routine workflow-related problems faced by the clinics. Text mining was performed on transcribed Interviews using SAS® Text Miner to validate these six categories and to further identify concept linking for a quantifiable insight. Two variables (Redundancy Reduction and Idle Time Generation) were derived from survey questions with low scores of -129 and -64 respectively out of 384. Finally, ANOVA was run using SAS® Enterprise Guide® 6.1 to determine whether the six qualitative categories affect the two quantitative variables differently.
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Ankita Srivastava, Oklahoma State University
Ipe Paramel, Oklahoma State University
Onkar Jadhav, Oklahoma State University
Jennifer Briggs, Oklahoma State University
F
Session 1108-2017:
Fitting a Cumulative Logistic Regression
Cumulative logistic regression models are used to predict an ordinal response. They have the assumption of proportional odds. Proportional odds means that the coefficients for each predictor category must be consistent or have parallel slopes across all levels of the response. This paper uses a sample data set to demonstrate how to test the proportional odds assumption. It shows how to use the UNEQUALSLOPES option when the assumption is violated. A cumulative logistic regression model is built, and then the performance of the model on a test set is compared to the performance of a generalized multinomial model. This shows the utility and necessity of the UNEQUALSLOPES option when building a cumulative logistic regression model. The procedures shown are produced using SAS® Enterprise Guide® 7.1.
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Shana Kelly, Spectrum Health
Session 0850-2017:
From Coder to Collaborator: Tips and Tricks for Being a Better Analyst
Are you a marketing analyst who speaks SAS®? Congratulations, you are in high demand! Or are you? Marketing analysts with programming skills are critical today. The ability to extract large volumes of data, massage it into a manageable format, and display it simply are necessary skills in the world of big data. However, programming skills are not nearly enough. In fact, some marketing managers are putting less and less weight on them and are focusing more on the softer skills that they require. This session will help ensure that you are not left out. In this session, Emma Warrillow shares why being a good programmer is only the beginning. She provide practical tips on moving from being a someone who is good at coding to becoming a true collaborator with marketing taking your marketing analytics to the next level. In 2016, Emma Warrillow's presentation at SAS® Global Forum was very well received (http://blogs.sas.com/content/sgf/2016/04/21/always-be-yourself-unless-you-can-be-a-unicorn/). In this follow-up, she revisits some of the highlights from 2016 and shares some new ideas. You can be sure of an engaging code-free session!
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Emma Warrillow, Data Insight Group Inc. (DiG)
H
Session SAS0378-2017:
How SAS® Customers Are Using Hadoop: Year in Review
Another year implementing, validating, securing, optimizing, migrating, and adopting the Hadoop platform. What have been the top 10 accomplishments with Hadoop seen over the last year? We also review issues, concerns, and resolutions from the past year as well. We discuss where implementations are and some best practices for moving forward with Hadoop and SAS® releases.
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Howard Plemmons, SAS
Mauro Cazzari, SAS
I
Session 0927-2017:
Improving Efficiency in SAS® Enterprise Guide®: Parallel Processing and Other Hidden Gems
In the past 10 years, SAS® Enterprise Guide® has developed into the go-to application to access the power of SAS®. With each new release, SAS continues to add functionality that makes the SAS user's life easier. We take a closer look at some of the built-in features within SAS Enterprise Guide and how they can make your life easier. One of the most exciting and powerful features we explore is allowing parallel execution on the same server. This gives you the ability to run multiple SAS processes at the same time regardless of whether you have a SAS® Grid Computing environment. Some other topics we cover include conditional processing within SAS Enterprise Guide, how to securely store database login and password information, setting up autoexec files in SAS Enterprise Guide, exploiting process flows, and much more.
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Steve First, Systems Seminar Consultants
Benjamin First, US Bank Corp
Session SAS0562-2017:
Increasing Your Productivity with New Features in SAS® Enterprise Guide®
SAS® Enterprise Guide® continues to add easy-to-use features that enable you to work more efficiently. For example, you can now debug your DATA step code with a DATA step debugger tool; upload data to SAS® Viya with a point-and-click task; control process flow execution behavior when an error occurs; export results to Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint destinations with the click of a button; zoom views; filter the data grid with your own WHERE clause; easily define case-insensitive filters; and automatically get the latest product updates. Come see these and more new features and enhancements in SAS Enterprise Guide 7.11, 7.12, and 7.13.
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Casey Smith, SAS
Session 1339-2017:
Interrupted Time Series Power Calculation using DO Loop Simulations
Interrupted time series analysis (ITS) is a tool that can be used to help Learning Healthcare Systems evaluate programs in settings where randomization is not feasible. Interrupted time series is a statistical method to assess repeated snap shots over regular intervals of time before and after a system-level intervention or program is implemented. This method can be used by Learning Healthcare Systems to evaluate programs aimed at improving patient outcomes in real-world, clinical settings. In practice, the number of patients and the timing of observations are restricted. This presentation describes a program that helps statisticians identify optimal segments of time within a fixed population size for an interrupted time series analysis. A macro creates simulations based on DO loops to calculate power to detect changes over time due to system-level interventions. Parameters used in the macro are sample size, number of subjects in each time frame in each year, number of intervals in a year, and the probability of the event before and after the intervention. The macro gives the user the ability to specify different assumptions that result in design options that yield varying power based on the number of patients in each time intervals given the fixed parameters. The output from the macro can help stakeholders understand necessary parameters to help determine the optimal evaluation design.
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Nigel Rozario, UNCC
Andrew McWilliams, CHS
Charity Moore, CHS
P
Session 0949-2017:
Personally Identifiable Information Secured Transformation
Organizations that create and store personally identifiable information (PII) are often required to de-identify sensitive data to protect an individual s privacy. There are multiple methods in SAS® that can be used to de-identify PII depending on data types and encryption needs. The first method is to apply crosswalk mapping by linking a data set with PII to a secured data set that contains the PII and its corresponding surrogate. Then, the surrogate replaces the PII in the original data set. A second method is SAS encryption, which involves translating PII into an encrypted string using SAS functions. This could be a one-byte-to-one-byte swap or a one-byte-to-two-byte swap. The third method is in-database encryption, which encrypts the PII in a data warehouse, such as Oracle and Teradata, using SAS tools before any information is imported into SAS for users to see. This paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of these three methods, provides sample SAS code, and describes the corresponding methods to decrypt the encrypted data.
Read the paper (PDF) | View the e-poster or slides (PDF)
Shuhua Liang, Kaiser Permanente
Zoe Bider-Canfield, Kaiser Permanente
Session 1326-2017:
Price Recommendation Engine for Airbnb
Airbnb is the world's largest home-sharing company and has over 800,000 listings in more than 34,000 cities and 190 countries. Therefore, the pricing of their property, done by the Airbnb hosts, is crucial to the business. Setting low prices during a high-demand period might hinder profits, while setting high prices during a low-demand period might result in no bookings at all. In this paper, we suggest a price recommendation methodology for Airbnb hosts that helps in overcoming the problems of overpricing and underpricing. Through this methodology, we try to identify key factors related to Airbnb pricing: factors influential in determining a price for a property; the relation between the price of a property and the frequency of its booking; and similarities among successful and profitable properties. The constraints outlined in the analysis were entered into SAS® optimization procedures to achieve a best possible price. As a part of this methodology, we built a scraping tool to get details of New York City host user data along with their metrics. Using this data, we build a pricing model to predict the optimal price of an Airbnb home.
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Praneeth Guggilla, Oklahoma State University
Singdha Gutha, Oklahoma State University
Goutam Chakraborty, Oklahoma State University
Session 0792-2017:
Pricing a Self-Funded Health Plan by Applying Generalized Linear Models Using SAS® Enterprise Guide®
This paper explores the utilization of medical services, which has a characteristic exponential distribution. Because of this characteristic, a variable generalized linear model can be applied to it to obtain self-managed health plan rates. This approach is different from what is generally used to set the rates of health plans. This new methodology is characterized by capturing qualitative elements of exposed participants that old rate-making methods are not able to capture. Moreover, this paper also uses generalized linear models to estimate the number of days that individuals remain hospitalized. The method is expanded in a project in SAS® Enterprise Guide®, in which the utilization of medical services by the base during the years 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 (the last year of the base) is compared with the Hospital Cost Index of Variation. The results show that, among the variables chosen for the model, the income variable has an inverse relationship with the risk of health care expenses. Individuals with higher earnings tend to use fewer services offered by the health plan. Male individuals have a higher expenditure than female individuals, and this is reflected in the rate statistically determined. Finally, the model is able to generate tables with rates that can be charged to plan participants for health plans that cover all average risks.
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Luiz Carlos Leao, Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF)
Q
Session 0173-2017:
Quick Results with SAS® Enterprise Guide®
SAS® Enterprise Guide® empowers organizations, programmers, business analysts, statisticians, and end users with all the capabilities that SAS has to offer. This hands-on workshop presents the SAS Enterprise Guide graphical user interface (GUI). It covers access to multi-platform enterprise data sources, various data manipulation techniques that do not require you to learn complex coding constructs, built-in wizards for performing reporting and analytical tasks, the delivery of data and results to a variety of mediums and outlets, and support for data management and documentation requirements. Attendees learn how to use the graphical user interface to access SAS® data sets and tab-delimited and Microsoft Excel input files; to subset and summarize data; to join (or merge) two tables together; to flexibly export results to HTML, PDF, and Excel; and to visually manage projects using flow diagrams.
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Kirk Paul Lafler, Software Intelligence Corporation
Ryan Lafler
Session 0926-2017:
Quick Results with SAS® Enterprise Guide®
SAS® Enterprise Guide® empowers organizations, programmers, business analysts, statisticians, and users with all the capabilities that SAS® has to offer. This hands-on workshop presents the SAS Enterprise Guide graphical user interface (GUI), access to multi-platform enterprise data sources, various data manipulation techniques without the need to learn complex coding constructs, built-in wizards for performing reporting and analytical tasks, the delivery of data and results to a variety of mediums and outlets, and support for data management and documentation requirements. Attendees learn how to use the GUI to access SAS data sets and tab-delimited and Excel input files; how to subset and summarize data; how to join (or merge) two tables together; how to flexibly export results to HTML, PDF, and Excel; and how to visually manage projects using flow diagrams.
Read the paper (PDF) | Download the data file (ZIP)
Kirk Paul Lafler, Software Intelligence Corporation
Ryan Lafler
R
Session 1275-2017:
Read SAS® Metadata in SAS® Enterprise Guide®
SAS® Management Console has been a key tool to interact with SAS® Metadata Server. But sometimes users need much more than what SAS Management Console can do. This paper contains a couple of SAS® macros that can be used in SAS® Enterprise Guide® and PC SAS to read SAS metadata. These macros read users, roles, and groups registered in metadata. This paper explains how these macros can be executed in SAS Enterprise Guide and how to change these macros to meet other business requirements. There might be some tools available in the market that can be used to read SAS metadata, but this paper helps in achieving most of them within a SAS client like PC SAS and SAS Enterprise Guide, without requiring any additional plug-ins.
Read the paper (PDF) | View the e-poster or slides (PDF)
Piyush Singh, Tata Consultancy Services
Steven Randolph, Lilly
S
Session SAS0447-2017:
Step Through Your DATA Step: Introducing the DATA Step Debugger in SAS® Enterprise Guide®
Have you ever run SAS® code with a DATA step and the results were not what you expected? Tracking down the problem can be a time-consuming task. To assist you in this common scenario, SAS® Enterprise Guide® 7.13 and beyond has a DATA step debugger tool. The simple and interactive DATA step debugger enables you to visually walk through the execution of your DATA step program. You can control the DATA step execution, view the variables, and set breakpoints to quickly identify data and logic errors. Come see the full capabilities of the new SAS Enterprise Guide DATA step debugger. You'll be squashing bugs in no time!
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Joe Flynn, SAS
Session 1419-2017:
Stored Processes or How to Make You Use SAS® Without Even Knowing It!
Dealing with analysts and managers who do not know how to or want to use SAS® can be quite tricky if everything you are doing uses SAS. This is where stored processes using SAS® Enterprise Guide® comes in handy. Once you know what they want to get out of the code, prompts can be defined in a smart and flexible way to give all users (whether they are SAS or not) full control over the output of the code. The key is having code that requires minimal maintenance and for you to be very flexible so that you can accommodate anything that the user comes up with. This session provides examples of credit risk stress testing where loss forecasting results were presented using different levels. Results were driven by a stored process prompt using a simple DATA step, PROC SQL, and PROC REPORT. This functionality can be used in other industries where data is shown using different levels of granularity.
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Edmund Lee, Bank of Montreal
Session 1095-2017:
Supplier Negotiations Optimized with SAS® Enterprise Guide®: Save Time and Money
Every sourcing and procurement department has limited resources to use for realizing productivity (cost savings). In practice, many organizations simply schedule yearly pricing negotiations with their main suppliers. They do not deviate from that approach unless there is a very large swing in the underlying commodity. Using cost data gleaned from previous quotes and SAS® Enterprise Guide®, we can put in place a program and methodology that move the practice from gut instinct to quantifiable and justifiable models that can easily be updated on a monthly basis. From these updated models, we can print a report of suppliers or categories that we should consider for cost downs, and suppliers or categories that we should work on to hold current pricing. By having all cost models, commodity data, and reporting functions within SAS Enterprise Guide, we are able to not only increase the precision and effectiveness of our negotiations, but also to vastly decrease the load of repetitive work that has been traditionally placed on supporting analysts. Now the analyst can execute the program, send the initial reports to the management team, and be leveraged for other projects and tasks. Moreover, the management team can have confidence in the analysis and the recommended plan of action.
View the e-poster or slides (PDF)
Cameron Jagoe, The University of Alabama
Denise McManus, The University of Alabama
T
Session 1322-2017:
The Orange Lifestyle
As a freshman at a large university, life can be fun as well as stressful. The choices a freshman makes while in college might impact his or her overall health. In order to examine the overall health and different behaviors of students at Oklahoma State University, a survey was conducted among the freshmen students. The survey focused on capturing the psychological, environmental, diet, exercise, and alcohol and drug use among students. A total of 795 out of 1,036 freshman students completed the survey, which included around 270 questions that covered the range of issues mentioned above. An exploratory factor analysis identified 26 factors. For example, two factors that relate to the behavior of students under stress are eating and relaxing. Further understanding the variables that contribute to alcohol and drug use might help the university in planning appropriate interventions and preventions. Factor analysis with Cronbach's alpha provided insight into a more defined set of variables to help address these types of issues. We used SAS® to do factor analysis as well as to create different clusters of students with unique characteristics and profiled these clusters
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Mohit Singhi, Oklahoma State University
U
Session 1268-2017:
Use SAS® Enterprise Guide® and SAS® Add-In for Microsoft Office to Support Enrollment Forecasting
This presentation explores the steps taken by a large public research institution to develop a five-year enrollment forecasting model to support the critical enrollment management process at an institution. A key component of the process is providing university stakeholders with a self-service, secure, and flexible tool that enables them to quickly generate different enrollment projections using the most up-to-date information as possible in Microsoft Excel. The presentation shows how we integrated both SAS® Enterprise Guide® and the SAS® Add-In for Microsoft Office to support this critical process, which had very specific stakeholder requirements and expectations.
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Andre Watts, University of Central Florida
Lisa Sklar, University of Central Florida
Session 0169-2017:
Using the New ODS EXCEL Destination in SAS® 9.4 When Working with Remote Servers
The ODS EXCEL destination has made sharing SAS® reports and graphs much easier. What is even more exciting is that this destination is available for use regardless of the platform. This is extremely useful when reporting is performed on remote servers. This presentation goes through the basics of using the ODS EXCEL destination and shows specific examples of how to use this in a remote environment. Examples for both SAS® on Windows and in SAS® Enterprise Guide® are provided.
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Thomas Bugg, Wells Fargo Home Mortgage
W
Session 0475-2017:
What's Love Gotta Do WITH It
It has become a need-it-now world, and many managers and decision-makers need their reports and information quicker than ever before to compete. As SAS® developers, we need to acknowledge this fact and write code that gets us the results we need in seconds or minutes, rather than in hours. SAS is a great tool for extracting, transferring, and loading data, but as with any tool, it is most efficient when used in the most appropriate way. Using the SQL pass-through techniques presented in this paper can reduce run time by up to 90% by passing the processing to the database instead of moving the data back to SAS to be consumed. You can reap these benefits with only a minor increase in coding difficulty.
Read the paper (PDF) | View the e-poster or slides (PDF)
Jason O'Day, US Bank
Session 1188-2017:
Where Does Cleopatra Really Belong? An Analysis of Slot Machine Placement and Performance Using SAS®
In the world of gambling, superstition drives behavior, which can be difficult to explain. Conflicting evidence suggests that slot machines, like BCLC's Cleopatra, perform well regardless of where they are placed on a casino floor. Other evidence disputes this, arguing that performance is driven by their strategic placement (for example, in high-traffic areas). We explore and quantify the location sensitivity of slot machines by leveraging SAS® to develop robust models. We test various methodologies and data import techniques (such as casino CAD floor plans) to unlock some of the nebulous concepts of player behavior, product performance, and superstition. By demystifying location sensitivity, key drivers of performance can be identified to aid in optimizing the placement of slot machines.
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Stephen Tam, British Columbia Lottery Corporation
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Session 0935-2017:
Zeroing In on Effective Member Communication: An Rx Education Study
In 2013, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) changed the pharmacy mail-order member-acquisition process so that Humana Pharmacy may only call a member with cost savings greater than $2.00 to educate the member on the potential savings and instruct the member to call back. The Rx Education call center asked for analytics work to help prioritize member outreach, improve conversions, and decrease the number of members who are unable to be contacted. After a year of contacting members using this additional insight, the conversions after agreement rate rose from 71.5% to 77.5% and the unable to contact rate fell from 30.7% to 17.4%. This case study takes you on an analytics journey from the initial problem diagnosis and analytics solution, followed by refinements, as well as test and learn campaigns.
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Brian Mitchell, Humana Inc.
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