University of Illinios WebStore, SAS, and State Farm invite you to SAS Day to explore SAS technologies and real world applications on Tuesday, April 8, 2014 in the Illini Union General Lounge (2nd floor).
SAS Day, April 8, 2014 — Illini Union General Lounge (2nd floor) — Link
SAS Certification Exams, April 9, 2014 — Registration Link
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SAS Day Schedule
9:00 am: Perform interactive data exploration with SAS Visual Analytics
(Presenter: André de Waal, Analytical Consultant, SAS)
Visualizations help business people to see things that were not obvious to them before. SAS Visual Analytics is a Web-based application that enables you to perform interactive data exploration and the creation of reports. It is targeted to helping businesses gain insight into their big data problems via a highly intuitive, visually appealing user interface backed by a high-performance, in-memory server that can execute analytics on large data sets in real time. This presentation focusses on SAS Visual Analytics Explorer and SAS Visual Analytics Designer and demonstrates how to interact with the environment, how to explore data and how to create reports.
10:00 am: State Farm Research & Development Center: Driving Environment Clustering
(Presenters: Meghan Goldfarb, Bill Messner, Jason Cleary and Kelsey Osterloo – State Farm Insurance)
The State Farm Research & Development Center employs approximately 90 interns in its facility on the U of I campus. Meghan and Bill’s presentation will give an overview of two of the functions; the actuarial research function and the MAGNet function. Then Kelsey and Jason will present preliminary results of an ongoing project, which is a collaboration between actuarial and MAGNet.
Telematics devices play an integral role in State Farm’s Drive Safe & Save program. Information from these devices is used to assign the driver a Drive Safe & Save Index (DSSI) used in pricing auto premiums. We tend to think of the DSSI as only a reflection of the individual driver’s habits, but they are also influenced by the environment the driver is in. This portion of the presentation will focus on the process utilized to determine driving environment clusters to better understand how driving behavior and driving environment are related to loss experience.
11:00 am: Explaining the Past and Modeling the Future: New Econometrics and Forecasting Tools in SAS
(Presenter: Kenneth Sanford, SAS, Senior Research Statistician
The importance of Econometrics and Forecasting in the Analytics toolkit is increasing every day. Econometric modeling helps to uncover structural relationships from observational data. Forecasting exploits those relationships to make predictions. This presentation highlights the many recent changes to the SAS/ETS and Forecasting portfolios which give users more power to explain the past and predict the future. We will show and provide examples of how Bayesian regression tools can be used for price elasticity modeling, how state-space models can be used to gain insight from inconsistent time series, how panel data methods help control for unobserved confounding effects and much more. The presentation will also provide an overview and demonstration of the SAS portfolio of forecasting tools.
Lunch Break
1:00 pm: Statistical & Pricing Research Opportunities at State Farm
(Presenters: Scott Farris, Alan Kessler & Angela Wu, State Farm Insurance)
State Farm is the largest insurer of automobiles and homes in the United States. We will present information about State Farm and the unique culture that makes State Farm a truly remarkable company. We will provide information on State Farm statistical opportunities, particularly as they relate to State Farm’s core business of insuring autos and homes.
2:00 pm: The Value of SAS Human Capital– Reproducing analytical results in the emerging era of ‘Big Data’
(Kenneth Sanford, Senior Research Statistician, SAS)
SAS is the world’s largest software company entirely devoted to Analytics. This talk will lay the foundation for the SAS System as a unified framework for reproducible analytical results in the emerging era of “big data”. We will discuss the origins of the company and the architecture of the software at a high level. The talk will also highlight the value of SAS skills for students and those early in their career.
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