Conference Workshops offer the bonus of additional educational experiences for SESUG Conference attendees.  We have talented, recognized, and experienced instructors prepared to share their knowledge in these 4-hour sessions.

SESUG is scheduling eight workshops this year with

one on Saturday, September 26;
six on Sunday, September 27; and
one on Wednesday, September 30!  

See the times in the table below.

The workshops cover a wide variety of topics and skill levels.  These 4-hour workshops will appeal to everyone interested in exceptional in-depth training.  Please note that workshops are an extra fee event at SESUG.

For information on registering for a workshop or the conference, please see Registration Information.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

PROC SQL Programming: The Basics and Beyond

Scheduled Time:  Saturday, September 26, 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Intended Audience:  The intended audience is all SAS users.  The pace of workshop is structured and attendees are given several achievable goals for learning advanced SAS programming techniques.

Instructor:  Kirk Paul Lafler, Software Intelligence Corporation

This course teaches SAS® users core concepts and features about accessing data stored in SAS datasets.  Attendees learn how to use PROC SQL to access data; accomplish essential programming tasks including retrieving, subsetting, ordering, and grouping data; construct logic scenarios with case expressions; explore one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many data relationships; understand the similarities and differences between DATA step merges and joins; create complex queries using inner and outer join constructs as well as with set operators; use summary (statistical) functions to aggregate data; create new tables; produce “quality” looking output using PROC SQL options with Output Delivery System (ODS); and interface PROC SQL with the macro facility to create single-value and multi-value (list) macro variables.

Instructor Bio:   Kirk Paul Lafler is consultant and founder of Software Intelligence Corporation and has been programming in SAS® since 1979.  He is a SAS Certified Professional, application developer, programmer, data scientist and provider of IT consulting services and training to SAS users around the world.  As the author of six books including Google® Search Complete! (Odyssey Press. 2014), PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS, Second Edition (SAS Institute. 2013) and PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS (SAS Institute. 2004), he has written more than five hundred papers and articles, been an Invited speaker at 400+ international, regional, special-interest, local, and in-house SAS user group conferences/meetings, and is the recipient of 23 “Best” contributed paper, hands-on workshop (HOW), and poster awards.  His popular SAS Tips column, “Kirk’s Korner of Quick and Simple Tips”, appears regularly in several SAS User Group newsletters and websites, and his fun-filled SASword Puzzles are featured in SAScommunity.org and many SAS Newsletters.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

All Together Now: Strategies for Combining Data from Multiple Sources

Scheduled Time:  Sunday, September 27, 8:00 am – 12:00 pm

Intended Audience:  The presentation is geared towards attendees who have been using SAS for some type of data management/ manipulation for at least a few months.  I do make some comparisons between SQL and the DATA step, which I have found to be useful for experienced SAS programmers with little exposure to SQL as well as those who have some SQL background but are relatively new to SAS.  I would say it moves at a moderate pace.  I have a lot of material, but with a half-day format have adequate time to address questions as they arise.

Instructor:  Christianna Williams, Independent Consultant

Problem 1: You have data in several different data sources, each at different levels of aggregation (such as person-level, site-level, and event-level), and you need to combine it into a single data set for analysis or generating a report.  Problem 2: You have data and “metadata” that need to be combined to produce a user-friendly report.  Problem 3: You have data from many different sites/time periods/events that need to be concatenated or interleaved to build a dataset with the desired structure.  Problem 4: You need to join data from two sources based on a range of values rather than an exact match.  What is the best SAS strategy to solve each of these problems?  When should you use a MERGE (or UPDATE)?  When should you use an INNER, OUTER, or LEFT join?  When should you use DATA Step SET or SQL UNION?  Or when would thoughtful use of SAS Formats allow you to combine the data in an efficient way?  This workshop will present examples of each of these problems and more, and discuss strategies and solutions for each in order to help you choose the best approach in the data combination challenges you face.  We will use DATA Step, PROC SQL, PROC FORMAT and other strategies to get our data act together!  I encourage you to bring examples of the types of data combination problems you have struggled with.

Instructor Bio:   Christianna Williams, PhD, is an independent consultant based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, focusing on study design and statistical analyses and reporting in epidemiology and health services research.  Arguably, she spent way too much time in school and holds degrees from Duke University, Yale University and the University of California at Berkeley.  Christianna started using SAS as a graduate student in population biology in 1985 and is still learning!  She is a frequent presenter at local and regional user group conferences as well as SAS Global Forum, and has been teaching about PROC SQL for more than 10 years.  She also devotes as much time as possible to her other passions: running, vegetarian cooking and reading novels.

Lies, damned lies and …. SAS to the rescue! Using SAS to avoid statistical errors

Scheduled Time:  Sunday, September 27, 8:00 am – 12:00 pm

Intended Audience:  Users of statistics who are not primarily statisticians – that is, people in the social, medical, behavioral and other sciences, and in business.

Instructor:  Peter Flom

In many fields, students getting a graduate degree take one, two or perhaps three statistics courses.  These courses may not fully equip them to understand the statistics they read, much less to perform statistical analysis.  In this course, I will cover some of the more common errors that occur in common statistical analyses (e.g. exploratory data analysis, regression/ANOVA, logistic regression and so on).  I will also cover ways to correct these errors (including when it may be necessary to call in a consultant).  These errors can be prosaic or philosophical and they can be unique to SAS or common to any statistical program.

For example:

• When is the mean inappropriate as a measure of central tendency?
• When is the standard deviation inappropriate as a measure of spread?
• What are some common but problematic graphics (and what are better alternatives?)
• How to check for the assumptions in (OLS) regression and what to do if they are violated?
• What is dependent data and how can it be dealt with?
• What methods are appropriate for variables at different points in Stevens scheme (nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio)?
• What methods of multivariate analysis should researchers be aware of?

Instructor Bio:   Peter Flom is an independent statistical consultant serving researchers and graduate students in the behavioral, social and medical sciences.  Prior to becoming an independent consultant, he worked for a research company investigating HIV, AIDS and drug abuse and other topics; a hospital, a start-up company doing research on electroencephalography and other firms.  He has been using SAS for 20 years and has presented at SESUG, MWSUG, SGF, NYASUG and at other conferences.

Moving on Up: Taking Your SAS Skills to the Next Level

Scheduled Time:  Sunday, September 27, 8:00 am – 12:00 pm

Intended Audience:  Beginner to intermediate SAS users who want to know how to improve their overall SAS and programming skills.

Instructor:  Stephanie Thompson

Are you ready to take you SAS programming to the next level?  Would you like to learn tips to make you more efficient and effective on the job?  If your answer is “Yes,” then this workshop is for you.  Multiple topics will be covered including pre-programming steps, well written data steps, commenting for understanding, macro basics, program layout and flow, how to create meaningful charts and graphs, communicating results up and down the organization chart, and more.  The workshop will include a presentation, demonstrations, and hands-on activities.  Attendees are also asked to submit examples of troublesome code prior to the conference for interactive review and assessment (all examples will be sanitized prior to use in the workshop).  Bring your questions and get ready to move your SAS abilities to the next level!

Instructor Bio:   Stephanie Thompson has over twenty years of experience in applying statistical and modeling techniques to solve business problems in various commercial and academic environments.  Strong understanding of data structures, a variety of analytical tools, and operating environments.  Views problems (opportunities?) in a broad context by examining the interrelations between issues and the local and broader operational framework.  Demonstrated skill at effectively communicating and working across multiple functional areas and at all organizational levels.  Stephanie has made dozens of presentations at local, regional, and international meetings and conferences to technical and non-technical audiences.

SAS DATA Step and Macro Language Debugging 101

Scheduled Time:  Sunday, September 27, 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Intended Audience:  The intended audience is all SAS users.

Instructor:  Kirk Paul Lafler, Software Intelligence Corporation

Users are always surprised to discover their programs contain bugs.  In fact, when asked, SAS® users will emphatically stand by their programs and logic by saying they are bug free.  But, the vast number of experiences along with the realities of writing code says otherwise.  Bugs in software can appear anywhere; whether accidentally built into the software by developers, or introduced by programmers when writing code.  No matter where the origins of bugs occur, the one thing that all SAS users know is that debugging SAS program errors and warnings can be a daunting, and humbling, task.  This course explores the world of SAS DATA step and Macro Language bugs, providing essential information about the different types of bugs, how bugs are created, the symptoms of bugs, how to locate bugs, and strategies and techniques on how to resolve bugs.  Attendees learn how to apply effective techniques to better understand, identify, and repair bugs and enable program code to work as intended.

Instructor Bio:   Kirk Paul Lafler is consultant and founder of Software Intelligence Corporation and has been programming in SAS® since 1979.  He is a SAS Certified Professional, application developer, programmer, data scientist and provider of IT consulting services and training to SAS users around the world.  As the author of six books including Google® Search Complete! (Odyssey Press. 2014), PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS, Second Edition (SAS Institute. 2013) and PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS (SAS Institute. 2004), he has written more than five hundred papers and articles, been an Invited speaker at 400+ international, regional, special-interest, local, and in-house SAS user group conferences/meetings, and is the recipient of 23 “Best” contributed paper, hands-on workshop (HOW), and poster awards.  His popular SAS Tips column, “Kirk’s Korner of Quick and Simple Tips”, appears regularly in several SAS User Group newsletters and websites, and his fun-filled SASword Puzzles are featured in SAScommunity.org and many SAS Newsletters.

Making the Most of Your Statistical Analysis with SAS® Programming and the Output Delivery System

Scheduled Time:  Sunday, September 27, 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Intended Audience:  People who do some statistical analysis and know some SAS programming and want to improve their skills and make their programs work more effectively.

Instructor:  Christine Riddiough, SAS Institute

This seminar teaches students how to use the SAS Output Delivery System to customize the output from their statistical analyses, and how to generate reports based on that output for consumption by business users and other information consumers in their organization.

It starts with a review of ODS basics, focusing on the data destination and using the ODS Output statement.  The ODS Trace as a mechanism for determining what output objects are created will be explored.  We will then examine some examples of how we can easily capture statistical information and report on it in a concise way.  Questions addressed will include:

• Which correlations are statistically significant? – use ODS to output correlation statistics to a data set and then use a data step to eliminate those that are non-significant.
• How can I get predicted values based on parameter estimates? – use ODS to capture parameter estimates and the use them to calculate predicted values.
• How can I compare a series of models from linear regression based on several statistics? – use ODS to capture the statistics and use data step programming and macro to produce a comparison table.

Data Cleansing

Scheduled Time:  Sunday, September 27, 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Intended Audience:  Anyone who needs to ensure data integrity.

Instructor:  Ron Cody

This half-day workshop explores ways to look for data errors using both DATA step programming and Base SAS procedures.  Functions such as NOTDIGIT, NOTALPHA, and NOTALNUM and many of the other character functions make SAS especially well-suited to this task.  A short discussion of SAS integrity constraints and audit trail data sets closes out the course.  Topics to be discussed include:

• Checking values of character variables
• Detecting numeric outliers
• Checking for duplicate observations
• Correcting data
• Creating integrity constraints and audit trails

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Building Reusable Tools with the SAS® Macro Language

Scheduled Time:  Wednesday, September 30, 8:00 am – 12:00 pm

Intended Audience:  All SAS users. (Prerequisites: Introduction to SAS Macro course or minimum 1-year SAS software experience)

Instructor:  Kirk Paul Lafler, Software Intelligence Corporation

The SAS® Macro Language is a powerful feature for extending and customizing the capabilities of the SAS System.  This course presents a practical approach to macro tool design and development, along with a collection of techniques for constructing reusable and effective macros tools.  Attendees learn how to build functional macros that process statements containing SAS code; learn basic design principles in the development of reusable macro tools; create macros containing keyword and positional parameters; utilize and implement defensive programming techniques; build a library of macro utility tools; interface the macro language and the SQL procedure to create single-value and/or value-list macro variables; develop efficient and portable macro language code; and debug and troubleshoot code errors, warnings, and other special messages.

Instructor Bio:   Kirk Paul Lafler is consultant and founder of Software Intelligence Corporation and has been programming in SAS® since 1979.  He is a SAS Certified Professional, application developer, programmer, data scientist and provider of IT consulting services and training to SAS users around the world.  As the author of six books including Google® Search Complete! (Odyssey Press. 2014), PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS, Second Edition (SAS Institute. 2013) and PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS (SAS Institute. 2004), he has written more than five hundred papers and articles, been an Invited speaker at 400+ international, regional, special-interest, local, and in-house SAS user group conferences/meetings, and is the recipient of 23 “Best” contributed paper, hands-on workshop (HOW), and poster awards.  His popular SAS Tips column, “Kirk’s Korner of Quick and Simple Tips”, appears regularly in several SAS User Group newsletters and websites, and his fun-filled SASword Puzzles are featured in SAScommunity.org and many SAS Newsletters.