Practical Business Analytics Using SAS

Practical Business Analytics Using SAS: A Hands-on Guide shows SAS users and businesspeople how to analyze data effectively in real-life business scenarios.

The book begins with an introduction to analytics, analytical tools, and SAS programming. The authors—both SAS, statistics, analytics, and big data experts—first show how SAS is used in business, and then how to get started programming in SAS by importing data and learning how to manipulate it. Besides illustrating SAS basic functions, you will see how each function can be used to get the information you need to improve business performance. Each chapter offers hands-on exercises drawn from real business situations.

The book then provides an overview of statistics, as well as instruction on exploring data, preparing it for analysis, and testing hypotheses. You will learn how to use SAS to perform analytics and model using both basic and advanced techniques like multiple regression, logistic regression, and time series analysis, among other topics. The book concludes with a chapter on analyzing big data. Illustrations from banking and other industries make the principles and methods come to life.

Readers will find just enough theory to understand the practical examples and case studies, which cover all industries. Written for a corporate IT and programming audience that wants to upgrade skills or enter the analytics field, this book includes:

• More than 200 examples and exercises, including code and datasets for practice.
• Relevant examples for all industries.
• Case studies that show how to use SAS analytics to identify opportunities, solve complicated problems, and chart a course.

Practical Business Analytics Using SAS: A Hands-on Guide gives you the tools you need to gain insight into the data at your fingertips, predict business conditions for better planning, and make excellent decisions. Whether you are in retail, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, government, or any other industry, this book will help your organization increase revenue, drive down costs, improve marketing, and satisfy customers better than ever before.

About the Authors

Shailendra Kadre is a senior IT and management consultant from Bangalore, India. He is the author of a 2011 Apress book, Going Corporate: A Geek’s Guide, which covers IT operations management and the business aspects of IT. He has more than 20 years of experience in manufacturing, IT delivery and operations, program management, pre-sales, enterprise sales, and business analytics. Currently, he is working with Hewlett-Packard India as a solutions consultant. His current interests include business analytics and enterprise printing solutions.

Shailendra earned his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi.

Venkat Reddy is a post graduate in applied statistics and informatics technology from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT ) Mumbai. He has more than 8 years' experience in Big Data analytics and several analytics software programs and tools including SAS and R. His major areas of expertise include credit risk model building, customer experience management, social media analytics, machine learning, NLP, text mining, and big data analytics. He has been associated with several prestigious analytics projects with reputed organizations and for international clients. Some of his major projects include an analytics plugin for a GIS tool, text mining and Twitter sentiment on social media data, football betting model building, a money laundering scorecard building, customer experience management, credit risk model building for consumer credit cards and loans, and visualizations on consumer credit risk metrics using Tableau. He also has expertise in predictive modeling, social media analytics, and data analytics that he has applied to projects with international companies.

Venkat is currently working with HP Global Analytics, India. He is working as a data scientist in an enterprise market share forecasting team.