ALGORITHMS FOR SUCCESS

SAS provides the 'The Power to Know' to augment training & research at the International Institute of Information Technology

Objective
The International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) is a new generation information technology school which is committed to delivering high quality, low-cost education in information sciences. The curriculum covers a diversity of disciplines related to IT, preparing the students for higher education as well as addressing the needs of the industry. IIIT is an autonomous institution conducting post-graduate teaching, industrial consulting, as well as frontier research in the information sciences.

In the spring of 2004, the International Institute of Information Technology introduced a course in statistical data mining, an emerging discipline, and among the most influential areas in information sciences with its application across various sectors like retail, banking, medical sciences and homeland security. Also with IIIT holding the mandate for teaching and research related to internet security, bioinformatics, databases, ERP, and other computationally intensive programs, there was a distinct need of a software tool that were essential for meeting the teaching and research needs.

The Challenge: Data Mining
With teaching and research as the focal point, IIIT needed a software that could perform data analysis and modeling. To meet the requirements of exploratory data analysis, modeling and pattern recognition, there was a need of a software tool that had features like univariate procedures, regression (simple, multiple, logistic), linear models, discriminant analysis (parametric and non-parametric), cluster analysis (Fastclus, Cluster, E-M algorithm), and Neural networks among others.

Why SAS?
As an established leader in statistical software offering a range of products covering data processing, data analysis, programming and modeling, SAS was the ideal choice to meet the teaching and research needs at the International Institute of Information Technology. Another distinctive capability which helped SAS score over other software tools like SPSS, S-plus, Matlab, was its accessibility to both the novice and the expert.

Explaining the rationale behind choice of the SAS for teaching & research, Prof. Choudur K. Lakshminarayan, Professor of Statistics & Computer Science, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore said, “Most of the academic and corporate institutions support SAS, and exposing our students to SAS and training them is helping meet the needs of the industry as well as providing them the tools to conduct research at the frontiers of technology.”

Highlighting the analytical capabilities of SAS, Prof. Lakshminarayan added, “From the point of view of data.exploration, predictive modeling, mathematical analysis, prototyping, high-end analytics, the ready availability of pre-programmed math & stat routines that can be easily integrated with the SAS programming language, SAS is indeed a god-send.”

Key Benefits
All the data analysis and modeling at IIIT is done using SAS programming language, SAS suite of statistics and mathematical algorithms, and the SAS Enterprise Miner.

Enterprise Miner at International Institute of Information Technology is today recognized as a valuable addition that has empowered the non-statisticians to engage in analysis and decision making, by extracting valuable nuggets of information in vast amounts of unstructured text.

According to Prof. Choudur K. Lakshminarayan, “Being able to alternate between Enterprise Miner and SAS/Stat to evaluate the performance of linear discriminant analysis, neural networks, k-nearest neighbor methods, non-parametric density estimation was very beneficial. Algorithms for database applications involved extensive Monte-carlo simulations in the SAS data step and needless to say, SAS came through for us.”

He adds, “With SAS's world class technical support, detailed documentation, availability of the latest and the greatest in statistics technology, we are certainly poised to gain a stronghold in the research fraternity. SAS has evolved as a strategic partner in our endeavor to impart quality training to the students at IIIT.”