SAS (Statistical Analysis System)

Image Source:- http://www.sas.com

What is SAS ?
SAS (Statistical Analysis System) is a software developed by SAS Institute for advanced analytics, business intelligence, data management and predictive analytics. It offers huge array of statistical functions, has good GUI (Graphical User Interface) for people to learn quickly and provides awesome technical support. It is very powerful in the area of data management, allowing you to manipulate your data in any way possible. It can perform most general statistical analyses (regression, logistic regression, survival analysis, analysis of variance, factor analysis, multivariate analysis).  However it is one most expensive software available for analytics.

Installing SAS University Edition
SAS University Edition is the free SAS software for students, teachers and professors. You can download SAS University Edition from http://www.sas.com/en_us/software/university-edition.html.

Image Source: http://www.sas.com

It requires a virtualization software package like VMware Player or Orcale Virtual Box on PC, Mac or Linux workstation.
You can download VMware Player at  http://www.vmware.com/products/player/ and Oracle Virtual Box at https://www.virtualbox.org/

After installing any one of the above virtualization software, you need to import the OVA file of SAS University Edition that you have downloaded earlier.

 

Using Git For Projects

Image Source: http://git-scm.com/

If you have ever worked in a project, you must be knowing about the problems that arises when multiple people edit same files which create a lot of confusion.In this blogpost, I am going to talk about Git and why it is being used widely by people working in projects of any scale. So let’s start.

What is Git?
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git was initially designed and developed by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development in 2005, and has since become the most widely adopted version control system for software development.

What does Git do exactly?
Git allows a team of people to work together, all using the same files. It helps the team to avoid the confusion that tends to happen when multiple people are editing the same files.It also helps you to save your project at different versions, so that you can retrieve a previous version of your project without any problem.

How does Git works?
The major difference between Git and any other VCS (Subversion and friends included) is the way Git thinks about its data. Most of the other systems store information as a list of file-based changes and think of the information they keep as a set of files and the changes made to each file over time while Git doesn’t think of or store its data this way. Instead, Git thinks of its data more like a set of snapshots of a mini file-system. Every time you commit, or save the state of your project in Git, it basically takes a picture of what all your files look like at that moment and stores a reference to that snapshot.So if your files have not changed, Git doesn’t store the file again rather it will link to the previous identical file it has already stored.

Want to learn more about Git?
Visit this link to learn more about Git: http://try.github.com/

 

Presenting the Results : Working with D3.js (A JavaScript Library)

Image Source :- http://www.d3js.org

Even a great analysis is worthless if no one understands the results or simply chooses to ignore them, and that depends upon the briefing or presentation to present analysis results to the users. Your analysis report has to be very reader-friendly and it should also contains certain elements like graphs, tables, charts etc. which convey information quickly and concisely.

D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. It helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG(Scalable Vector Graphics) and CSS. It allows you to bind arbitrary data to a Document Object Model (DOM), and then apply data-driven transformations to the document. It is fast, supports large datasets and has dynamic behaviors for interaction and animation.

Few examples:

Image Source:- http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/5944371

Image Source:-http://bost.ocks.org/mike/sankey/

How to download and use D3.js ?
You can download the latest version at www.d3js.org or,you can directly link to the latest release, by copying the following snippet:

<script src="http://d3js.org/d3.v3.min.js" charset="utf-8"></script>