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Roundtable with Advanced Analytics Staff: Preparing for SAS® Global Forum

Pushpal, can you describe how you put together your SAS Global Forum paper?

Mukhopadhyay: Yes. I'm presenting a paper on my new procedure in SAS/STAT® named SURVEYPHREG, which performs proportional hazards regression on sample survey data. Just like demos, paper presentations need to appeal to a variety of users. I find it helps to focus on an example. This year, I started my paper by finding an appropriate data set from a longitudinal health survey performed by the National Institute of Health Statistics. I then analyzed the data using PROC SURVEYPHREG, and I described its features as I wrote about the analysis steps.

Wicklin: I do the same thing. It has to be interesting data; it has to be something that allows you to tell a compelling story.

Advanced Analytics

What's the process after that?

Wicklin: Once I get a draft together, I run it by colleagues, both the ones who can address the technical details with their expert knowledge and others who may not be familiar with a particular area.

Mukhopadhyay: We also go through one or two cycles of an editing and copyediting process. We have a great editor in Anne Jones (all agree). And then we prepare our slides, and we give one or two mock presentations to our colleagues for practice and feedback. It's very useful, particularly when I was new to SAS, and I didn't have any idea what to expect at the conference.

Wicklin: When we serve as audience members at these mock presentations, we evaluate the presentation from the point of view of the audience, which will include practical statisticians, theoretical statisticians, and statistical programmers who use our software but aren't necessarily statisticians themselves. We ask questions that we anticipate these users will ask.

Anderson: We also have a speaker boot camp that really helped me last year in terms of technique and how to give a good presentation. I'm planning on getting another critique this year.

Continued: Coming Attractions