NJSUG

NJSUG 2009 Third Quarter Meeting

The meeting was in the morning (9:00am - noon) on Friday, September 11th at:

Agenda

Data Visualization Using JMP and SAS

John Tukey said, "The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see." The proposed talk focuses on using graphics to grasp relationships in data and understand the meaning of statistical tests through JMP' visualization capabilities. The talk also showcases some of the unique graphics in JMP:

• Graph Builder which is a drag-and-drop solution to graphing
• Profiler which allows people to ask "what if" questions for how changing different factors or inputs will affect the response
• Bubble Plot which shows 5 different dimensions on one graph and allows you to change variables on the fly

The second part of the presentation will discuss JMP's integration with SAS. This will include opening SAS data sets directly in JMP, writing and running SAS programs from JMP, and running SAS stored processes from JMP. The SAS results can be brought directly into JMP for further analysis.

Valerie Hyde is a Systems Engineer for JMP, a division of SAS. She is passionate about data visualization and using analytics to help companies make better business decisions. Before joining SAS, Valerie worked for Accenture in the Marketing Science group and at AT&T Research on a project to model the effectiveness of viral marketing on a direct mail campaign. She has also performed econometric modeling for the US Justice Department's Antitrust Division, the US Census Bureau, and MiCRA Inc., a boutique consulting company.

Valerie earned a PhD in applied mathematics and statistics from the University of Maryland. Her research, which has been published in The American Statistician and Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, focused on mining online auction data for patterns in the price process. She also has a bachelor's degree in mathematics and economics from Binghamton University.

Development on a Dime: Creating Your SAS Programming Environment

Download: Presentation Slides and UserDefineLang.xml (zipped). See the Readme.txt file for the installation instruction fot the xml file.

When the author joined HMS, the use of SAS software was new to his organization. Given a preference for software development tools that were inexpensive and open-source, the author assembled a SAS development environment to make program creation and data analysis easier and faster. Key elements of this environment include:

• Notepad++ Editor, configured to color-code key SAS words
• library of frequently used program templates, routines and lookup tables
• departmental Autoexec.sas program and Autocall macro library

Batch processing is the author's favorite mode of executing substantial SAS programs so he modified his MS Windows desktop mode so the development environment was adjusted to make it easier to create new SAS program.

Recently, SAS was also licensed and installed on a Linux server. The author is currently at work to update the development environment so that programs can be run under Windows or Linux without alteration.

Michael Davis is a Senior SAS Analyst for Health Market Science in King of Prussia. He undertakes programming and statistical analysis in support of product development. He previously worked for Aetna, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Connecticut and the Connecticut Hospital Association. Michael has been a SAS user since 1985 and previously specialized in developing decision support, data warehousing and web-based systems with SAS software. He has frequently presented papers at SUGI/SGF, NESUG, and local SAS user groups. Michael holds a Masters in Health Administration from Duke University.