Chapter 8

A Painless Introduction to Analytics

In This Chapter

bullet Understanding basic analytic concepts

bullet Discovering how to count

bullet Rearranging and massaging your data kinks

bullet Correlations for the masses

bullet Regressing to the mean

Leveraging the power of analytics that SAS has to offer is a reason why many customers buy and continue to use SAS. The ability to leverage past data to better understand what happened, to make better decisions about what to do today, and to forecast future behavior and outcomes is what statistics and analytics are about. This chapter and Chapter 9 provide an overview of what each analytic area is about, why you would want to leverage it, and the value you can obtain with it. Note that an in-depth understanding of general principles in each analytic area is beyond the scope of this book, but is crucial to getting the most from these techniques.

Analytic Concepts Useful for Everyone

Unfortunately, this book can’t make you an expert in statistics. But we do provide ...

Get SAS For Dummies now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.