About This Book

Purpose

This book serves as a tutorial for data analysts who are new to SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Enterprise Miner. It provides valuable hands-on experience using powerful statistical software to complete the kinds of business analytics common to most industries. With clear, illustrated, step-by-step instructions, it will lead you through examples based on business case studies. You will formulate the business objective, manage the data, and perform analyses that you can use to optimize marketing, risk, and customer relationship management, as well as business processes and human resources.

Prerequisites

If you are a savvy business person with a desire to understand what drives your business, then this book can help you get started. You need access to SAS Enterprise Guide or SAS Enterprise Miner software; we provide you with example data to get started, but you will need data to analyze. An understanding of basic statistics is helpful, but not required.

Organization

The book begins by helping you determine and structure the objective of your analysis in accordance with the goals and objectives of your organization or department.

Chapter 2 describes types and sources of data for analysis. Chapter 3 offers an overview of common business analyses, covering both descriptive and predictive analysis. Chapter 4 shows you how to construct a data set for analysis. Chapter 5 details step-by-step instructions for a simple descriptive analysis. Chapter 6 offers the same level of detail for a typical market analysis. Chapters 7 and 8 offer a step-by-step guide to cluster and tree analyses, respectively. Each chapter concludes with a section headed “Notes from the Field,” which offers related business advice and leadership tips.

To conclude, Chapter 9 brings several concepts together in a full step-by-step case study for building and comparing predictive models, culminating in final “Notes from the Field.”

Examples

SAS Institute and SAS Press provide access to software updates and the author’s example data sets so that you can practice the examples in this book.

Software Used

The software packages used in the writing of this book are SAS Enterprise Guide 6.1 M1 and SAS Enterprise Miner 13.1. Although these are the latest versions available at the time of publication, new features will appear in later releases. Visit the SAS Products and Solutions webpage for updates and enhancements to all SAS system software at http://www.sas.com/en_us/software/all-products.html.

Data Sets

You can access the data used in the author’s examples by linking to this book’s author page at http://support.sas.com/publishing/authors. Select the name of the author. Then look for the cover thumbnail of this book, and select Example Data to display the SAS data sets associated with this book.

For an alphabetical listing of all books for which example code and data sets are available, see http://support.sas.com/bookcode. To display a book’s example code, select its book title.

If you are unable to access data sets through the website, email [email protected].

Additional Help

Although this book illustrates many analyses regularly performed in businesses across industries, questions specific to your aims and issues may arise. To fully support you, SAS Institute and SAS Press offer you the following help resources:

•  For questions about topics covered in this book, contact the author through SAS Press:

  Send questions by email to [email protected]; include the book title in your correspondence.

  Submit feedback on the author’s page at http://support.sas.com/author_feedback.

•  For questions about topics in or beyond the scope of this book, post queries to the relevant SAS Support Communities at https://communities.sas.com/welcome.

•  SAS Institute maintains a comprehensive website with up-to-date information. One page that is particularly useful to both the novice and the seasoned SAS user is its Knowledge Base. Search for relevant notes in the “Samples and SAS Notes” section of the Knowledge Base at http://support.sas.com/resources/.

•  Registered SAS users or their organizations can access SAS Customer Support at http://support.sas.com/. Here you can pose specific questions to SAS Customer Support; under Support, click Submit a Problem. You will need to provide an email address to which replies can be sent, identify your organization, and provide a customer site number or license information. This information can be found in your SAS logs.

Keep in Touch

We look forward to hearing from you. We welcome questions, comments, and concerns. If you want to contact us about a specific book, please include the book title in your correspondence. For a complete list of books available through SAS, visit http://support.sas.com/bookstore.

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