Book Image

Big Data Analytics with SAS

Book Image

Big Data Analytics with SAS

Overview of this book

SAS has been recognized by Money Magazine and Payscale as one of the top business skills to learn in order to advance one’s career. Through innovative data management, analytics, and business intelligence software and services, SAS helps customers solve their business problems by allowing them to make better decisions faster. This book introduces the reader to the SAS and how they can use SAS to perform efficient analysis on any size data, including Big Data. The reader will learn how to prepare data for analysis, perform predictive, forecasting, and optimization analysis and then deploy or report on the results of these analyses. While performing the coding examples within this book the reader will learn how to use the web browser based SAS Studio and iPython Jupyter Notebook interfaces for working with SAS. Finally, the reader will learn how SAS’s architecture is engineered and designed to scale up and/or out and be combined with the open source offerings such as Hadoop, Python, and R. By the end of this book, you will be able to clearly understand how you can efficiently analyze Big Data using SAS.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Data preparation for analytics


 SAS has been dealing with data for over 41 years and specifically preparing data to be analyzed using analytics. There are certain features of the data step language, as well as certain PROCs, that save a programmer's time and effort in preparing data for analytics.

Analytical data management and analytics is an iterative process done many times. During analysis, the two phases are iterated over and over until the final results are available:

Figure 3.1: Data management for analytics

It is indispensable for an analytic environment for data management features and analytics capabilities to be seamlessly integrated and available in one platform. One of the most powerful aspects of using SAS for analytics is the fact that SAS has always offered powerful data management capabilities along with a comprehensive set of analytics, all within on environment or platform. In this chapter, we will be looking at some of the unique features within SAS that either take much...