INTRO TO SAS ( Statistical Analysis System/Software)
What is SAS?
SAS (Statistical analysis system) was released in 1976(stable) and one of the most popular and leading software for data analysis. It is extensively used for mainly in two fields/areas Finance and Clinical and also used for various tasks such as data management, data mining, report writing, statistical analysis, business modeling, applications development and data warehousing. SAS is one of the key skills for many job markets. It is tagged ‘leader’ in Advanced Analytics Platforms as per Gartner 2019 Magic Quadrant for Data Science & Machine Learning Platforms. Even after 4 decades SAS is still the leader in Data Analysis.
Why SAS is popular in job market?
SAS has over 50,000 customers worldwide and holds biggest market share in the filed of advanced analytics. It has been dubbed ‘leader’ for last 6 consecutive years in advanced analytics platforms.
Finance Domain
In finance BFSI ( Banking, financial services and insurance) industry, SAS holds 1st place and is go to tool for data manipulation and predictive modeling.
Clinical Domain
In Clinical Domain SAS is extensively used to analyse and process the complex data generated from various clinical trails. It is used to predict the use of drugs by varying the dosage and seeing the trends offered by the same. It uses different statistical techniques to carry out the same. In clinical domain SAS is considered as the King and is most widely recognized to for clinical analysis and research.
Key SAS Advantages
- Data Security : Because of unparalleled/uncompromising data security provided by SAS software. Hence SAS is leading the analytics software industry in BFSI sector.
- Tech Customer Support : SAS provides one of the best tech support personnel in the world. If you are stuck in anything related to SAS whether it is installation related issue or clarity in any of SAS functions and procedures, they have both online and offline community to support you. And there are tonnes of blogs to help.
- Detailed Documentation : SAS documentation/Notes(simple terms) is very detailed as compared to open source software like R and Python.
- Memory Management: One major advantage of SAS software is it can store datasets on hard drive and process bigger data set than size of your RAM.
- Stable Software and cost of software license : All the codes that contain functions and procedures of previous software version are supported in new SAS versions. Cost of software license is very less to a bank or pharmaceutical company.
- Legacy /Tradition System :Many banks have been using SAS for last 20–35 years and they have automated the whole process of analysis and have written millions of lines of working code. Making it one of the best reporting software.
SAS Modules
SAS has several in-built modules which are designed for various analytics and reporting purposes. Some of the common SAS modules are
- Base SAS : It is the most common SAS module. It is used for data manipulation such as filtering data, selecting, renaming or removing columns, reshaping data etc.
- SAS/STAT : It performs popular statistical techniques such as Hypothesis Testing, Linear and Logistic Regression, Principal Component Analysis ANOVA,ANCOVA, T-Test etc.
- SAS/ACCESS : It lets you to read data from databases such as SQL Server, Oracle DB2 etc.
- SAS/MACROS : Develop automation process, customization of SAS applications using macros facility.
- SAS/GRAPH : Generate simple and complex graphs using this component.
- SAS/EG: SAS enterprise Guide simply menu drives or options, mainly used in banking sector.
How to download and install SAS Software
SAS Software is available for free and paid. It’s not a trial version but a complete software with almost all the functionalities of paid enterprise version of SAS.
SAS University Edition (excluisve for Students,Researchers academics)
- Installation Required
- Run on local machine (laptop / Desktop)
- No Internet Required runs offline.
Link to download SAS University Edition.
References
- SAS Community.
