Providing software solutions since 1976
Providing software solutions since 1976
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SAS® Analytics tie winter storms to spikes in hospitalizationsUCF team wins Data Mining Shootout; predictive analytics can help health care providers prepareCARY, NC (Dec. 21, 2011) – When winter storms keep us indoors, we share more than cocoa. We also trade germs that can lead to hospitalizations. Using SAS Analytics, a University of Central Florida (UCF) research team won the fifth annual Data Mining Shootout by showing that winter storms had the greatest impact on infectious diseases, surpassing the effect of floods, thunderstorms and windstorms. The analytics competition was co-sponsored by business analytics leader SAS and Central Michigan University's Institute for Business Insights. It offers students an opportunity to put data mining skills to the test. Team members analyzed weather, population, demographic and hospitalization data to predict which conditions result in more hospitalizations. UCF competed against 40 teams from 13 colleges and universities to win this year's data mining competition. “SAS strongly supports innovation in education,” said Jerry Oglesby, Senior Director of Education at SAS. “It's a competitive job market out there. The annual Data Mining Shootout allows students to demonstrate advanced analytical skills. These students were exceptionally creative. The resulting predictive models are valuable to healthcare providers, helping them match the appropriate staffing levels and resources to needs.” In fact, all of the top 25 health plans and pharmaceutical companies depend on SAS Analytics including solutions such as SAS® for health care providers. "We aimed at developing an early warning system for forecasting diseases," said Jun Han, captain of the UCF team. "The data sets were complicated but, with SAS Analytics at our fingertips, we were well equipped for analytic data preparation, data mining, modeling and reporting. SAS® Enterprise Miner™ helped us improve the accuracy of our predictive models." Han's team included Chun He, Baiyun Chen, Puwei Chen, Lei Zhang, Junan Miao and Zhixing Chen. More than 3,000 colleges, universities and business schools in 126 countries use SAS®. With education specialists on every continent, SAS serves higher education by delivering software, strategic services and academic programs that spark innovation and expand educational opportunities.
SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions, SAS helps customers at more than 50,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world
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