About This Book

Purpose

Analytics is the key driver of how organizations make business decisions to gain competitive advantage. While the popular press has been abuzz with Big Data, we believe in “it is the analysis, stupid.” Having Big Data means little if that data is not leveraged via analytics to create better value for all stakeholders. One of the primary drivers of Big Data is the advent of social media that has exponentially increased the rate at which textual data is generated on the Internet and the World Wide Web. In addition to data generated via the Internet and the web, organizations have large repositories of textual data collected via forms, reports, customer surveys, voice-of-customers, call-center records and so on. There are numerous organizations that simply collect and store large volumes of unstructured text data, which are yet to be explored to uncover hidden nuggets of useful information that can benefit their business. However, there are not a lot of resources available that can efficiently handle text data for the business analyst community. This book is designed to help industries leverage their textual data and SAS tools to perform comprehensive text analytics.

Is This Book for You?

Typical readers are business analysts, data analysts, customer intelligence analysts, customer insights analysts, web analysts, social media analysts, students in professional courses related to analytics and SAS programmers. Anyone who wants to retrieve, organize, categorize, analyze, and interpret textual data for generating insights about customer and prospects’ behaviors, their sentiments and want to use such insights for making better decisions will find this book useful.

Prerequisites

While some familiarity with SAS products will be beneficial, this book is intended for anyone who is willing to learn how to apply text analytics using primarily the point-and-click interfaces of SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Text Miner, SAS Content Categorization Studio, SAS Information Retrieval Studio and SAS Sentiment Analysis studio.

Software Used to Develop the Book’s Content

Below is a list of software used in this book. Be sure to check out the SAS website for updates and changes to the software. The SAS support website contains the latest Online Help documents that have enhancements and changes in new releases of the software.

• SAS^® Enterprise Miner (Release 7.1 and Release 12.1)

• SAS^® Text Miner (Release 4.1 and 5.1)

• SAS^® Crawler, SAS^® Search and Indexing (Release 12.1)

• SAS^® Enterprise Content Categorization Studio (Release 12.1)

• SAS^® Sentiment Analysis Studio (Release 12.1)

Note: SAS^® Information Retrieval Studio is a graphical user interface (GUI) based framework using SAS^® Crawler, SAS^® Search and Indexing components that can be configured and maintained.

Example Code and Data

You can access the example code and data for this book at http://support.sas.com/publishing/authors. From this website select Goutam Chakraborty or Murali Pagolu or Satish Garla. Then look for the cover image of this book, and select “Example Code and Data” to download the SAS programs and data that are included in this book. The data and programs are organized by chapter and case study.

The case studies in this book contain step-by-step instructions for performing a specific type of analysis with the given data. A lot of text mining tasks are subjective and iterative. It is difficult to list each and every task performed in the analysis. The results that you see in your analysis when you follow the exact steps as listed in the case study might differ slightly from the screenshots in the case study. Hence, we also provide you with the SAS^® Enterprise Miner projects that the case study authors created in their analysis. These projects can be accessed from the authors’ website.

For an alphabetical listing of all books for which example code and data is available, see http://support.sas.com/bookcode. Select a title to display the book’s example code.

If you are unable to access the code through the Web site, send e-mail to [email protected].

Additional Resources

SAS offers you a rich variety of resources to help build your SAS skills and explore and apply the full power of SAS software. Whether you are in a professional or academic setting, we have learning products that can help you maximize your investment in SAS.

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