Applying Statistical Concepts using SAS®

Role

Statistical Analyst.

Duration

3 days

Description

This three-day course is an excellent follow-on to the SAS® Essentials for anyone using statistics in a business environment. It covers a range of introductory statistical topics and uses SAS to carry out data investigation and analyses. Emphasis will be placed on the interpretation of the results to answer business problems through examination and prediction of data correlation.

Prerequisites

Before attending this course, you should have: Experience executing SAS programs and creating SAS data sets, which you can gain from a SAS Essentials: An Introduction to SAS Programming course. An understanding of basic mathematical concepts e.g. calculating percentages. Some familiarity with basic statistical concepts such as variability may be beneficial.

SAS Modules Used

SAS/STAT, SAS/GRAPH

Course Topics

Business Problems and Statistical Solutions:

• Understanding the purpose of statistics
• Calculating some simple summary statistics
• Interpreting output from the MEANS and UNIVARIATE procedures
• Examing the variability of data, why can we never be sure?

Testing Business Questions:

• Introduction to terminology for testing questions
• What is a t-test and when is it used?
• How can I obtain and interpret a p-value?
• Interpreting output from the UNIVARIATE and TTEST procedures
• What is analysis of variance

Categorised Data

• Why is it different?
• Examining categorised data with the FREQ procedure
• Examining and testing for an association between two variables
• Calculating and interpreting the chi-square test for association

Is There a Relationship Between Two Continuous Variables?

• Exploring the relationship between two continuous variables
• Measuring a linear relationship using correlation
• Interpreting the output from the CORR procedure
• Understanding the misuses of correla

How can we look at more than two continuous variables?

• Is our target variable related to more than one variable?
• Can we get better predictions by using more variables?
• How can we select the 'best' variables?

What if our target variable is binary?

• Why do we need to do something different?
• What is logistic regression and how does it work?
• How can I interpret the results from the LOGISTIC procedure?
• What is an odds ratio and why is it useful?

Output Delivery System (optional):

• How the output delivery system can help

Objectives

After attending this course, you will be able to: See how statistics can be used to answer business problems, Interpret some simple summary statistics, Assess the precision of your statistics, Examine ways of testing business questions, Examine relationships between variables, Produce predictions of target variables, Explain why categorised data are treated differently, Know what to do if your target variable is binary (e.g. Yes/No, Default/Repay)