SAS, University version

Why SAS?

SAS is short for “Statistical Analysis System”.

Timeline:

• 1966, prototype was developed by Barr and Goodnight, and funded by NIH
• 1976, they moved from North Carolina State University and founded SAS Institute.
• 1985, SAS was rewritten in C to allow it run on Unix, MS-DOS, and windows.
• 2002, Text Miner component was introduced.
• 2010, a free version for student was introduced.
• 2010-12, sued world programming, but European Court of Justice ruled that “the functionality of a computer program and the programming language cannot be protected by copyright”

So SAS has a long history and its target customers are enterprise analytics.

Features:

• It is web browser based. Although starting a local server by virtual machine seems a little complicated, it has the advantage of cross-platform
• It can be seen as “advanced statistical version“ of Excel, which has rich GUI for people to learn quickly and provides brilliant technical support.
• Big corporations like SAS because there’s a complete ecosystem that satisfies customers’ every need.
• its direct competitors are Stata and SPSS (acquired by IBM).
• You click on the front-end, the corresponding codes are automatically generated in the back-end. This means you can have the code to generate the exact same graph or make changes on that.
• Integrate with SQL seamlessly.

And the usage differs by industry sectors:

University Edition

This version is free. check here. SAS University Edition includes SAS® Studio, Base SAS®, SAS/STAT®, SAS/IML®, SAS/ACCESS® and several time series forecasting procedures from SAS/ETS®.

There are 2 approaches to get SAS running:

1. download a .ova file (2.2GB). use virtual box to start a local host and run SAS locally.
2. use AWS AMI: SAS University Edition. You have to pay EC2 fee ranging from 0.012-0.047 /hr. It’s actually pretty cheap.

Follow SAS University Edition quick start

Open a new browser window with http://localhost:10080/ And you are good to go.

learn

http://support.sas.com/training/tutorial/

SAS programs have a DATA step, which retrieves and manipulates data, usually creating an SAS data set, and a PROC step, which analyzes the data.

data highchol;
    set sashelp.heart;
    where Chol_Status = "High";
run;
proc print data = highchol;
run;
proc print data = sashelp.cars;    /*two-level name: library.table */
    by Make;
    var Make Model Type;
run;

create library/ import csv

libname libsas 'S:/datafiles'; /* physical location of the dataset, which can be found in file's property */
data titanic;
    infile '/folders/myfolders/train.csv' dlm=',' firstobs=2; 
    input PassengerId Survived Pclass Name Sex;
run;

use proc import is much more convenient, you don’t need to manually assign the column name. video guide which uses the snippets

/** FOR CSV Files uploaded from Unix/MacOS **/
FILENAME CSV "/folders/myfolders/train.csv" TERMSTR=LF;
/** Import the CSV file.  **/
PROC IMPORT DATAFILE=CSV
            OUT=WORK.MYCSV
            DBMS=CSV
            REPLACE;
run;
/** Print the results. **/
PROC PRINT DATA=WORK.MYCSV; RUN;
/** Unassign the file reference.  **/
FILENAME CSV;
run;

Alternatively, you can use tasks and utilities -> utilities -> import data. Then drag and drop the file from the “server files and folders”.

Graph

scatterplot

ods graphics / reset imagemap;
proc sgplot data=SASHELP.CARS;
    title "Vehicle Statistics";
    scatter x=Horsepower y=MPG_City / group=Origin 
        markerattrs=(symbol=CircleFilled size=12) transparency=0.7 name='Scatter';
    xaxis grid;
    yaxis grid;
    keylegend / location=Inside across=1;
run;
ods graphics / reset;
title;

Other plots like barplot, histogram are similar.

Certification training

The ad is for version 9.3, 2011, while the latest version is 9.4, 2013.

There are several certification packages:

• Base programming: 3.1 k
• Advanced programming: 3.8 k/2.45k
• Predictive Modeling: 2.65 k
• statistical analysis: 3.05 k

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