What Are The Best Way to Prepare For SAS Statistical Business Certification?

For any individual to become successfully certified in the above-mentioned certification, there are quite a number of things they need to be proficient at.
These are:

  1. Being able to generate descriptive statistics and knowing how to explore data with graphs.
  2. Being able to perform analysis of variance, linear regression and so on.
  3. Being able to score new data with the help of developed methods and having an expertise in the process of fitting a logistical regression model.

Apart from these, SAS programming is a prerogative for the candidate to be extremely strong in the fields of both mathematics and statistics. The beginning of anything must be punctuated with proper research about the same. Similarly, before starting off on your journey to gain this certification, it is important to have a proper in-depth understanding of all the statistical concepts and also hone your modelling skills.Data Analytics Banner
Once you’ve cemented your base, there are quite a number of way you could opt for.

  1. You could always get hired by a company which has a policy of on job training of their employees. Not every company believes in training their recruits from scratch mainly because it is not really the prerogative. But there are some companies who make extensive use of data analytics in their daily activities. Such companies are willing to invest in training their employees quite thoroughly.
  2. Get this certification in the most formal way there is. Through joining a professional training course. This way you will be able to get the required technical skills and help in structuring your overall personality in a way where it would get you closer. There are many institutes today like one Imarticus Learning which actually has a series of courses called Prodegree course, which train you thoroughly enough for you to become eligible to achieve the Statistical Business Certification.
  3. Enrolling yourself for internships by far is one of the best ways touted by many professionals. This is mainly because it’s the first instance where you are able to get all the first-hand experience that you need in the future as well as when you will be looking to actually make this your proper career.
  4. Networking is one thing that works best too. Mainly because you get to interact with people who actually have either gotten the certification or pursuing it. This makes it very important as they are able to provide you with insights and tips that you would not have been aware of if you want through this path alone.
  5. One very important thing to do is read, read and keep on reading. There are many books available both offline as well as online. Apart from that, there are books specific to your syllabus topics which would help as well.

Of these ways, it is believed that the best way would always be to take up a course which gets you closer to the certification. Which is why institutes like Imarticus Learning have actually become quite popular recently.

 

15 Surprising Stats about SAS Programming

Initially developed for analysing statistics in the 1960s, SAS programming has come a long way since then. From statistical analysis to the graphical representation of data, you can learn SAS to customise it to your field.
Whether you’re into business analysis or medicinal research, SAS can handle huge sets of data and display it in a readable format. So, should you learn SAS?
Check these fifteen stats about SAS programming to find out –
1) SAS is a programming language
While SAS offers a GUI (short for – Graphical User Interface), at its core, it’s a fourth-generation programming language. But it’s designed to reduce the time and efforts you need in analytics.
2) SAS programs only have two kinds of steps
The SAS programs have a combination of only two types of steps – DATA (to manage the data) and PROC (to process and present the data).
3) SAS is the most used tool
It’s the most used tool when it comes to data analysis and business decision making. In fact, SAS programming platform holds about 30.5 per cent of the market share of advanced and predictive analytics. It’s more than double the market share of its nearest competitor.
4) The fifth largest player in Business Intelligence software
SAS is the largest independent software vendor for Business Intelligence software products. With 6.9% market share, the SAS programming language is the fifth largest.
5) 42.6 market share in Health Research
As per a 2011 study, 42.6 per cent of data analysis in health was done with the SAS programming software.
6) SAS reinvests 26% of revenue
Investment in R&D by SAS is more than double the industry average of 12.5%. It invests 26% of its revenue. One of the reasons why you should learn SAS and keep yourself updated.
7) $60 million donations to non-profits
In the US, the company donated more than $59 million worth of software, hardware and training among other things in 2017. And then, there was $1.3 million in cash.
8) Joined 30,000 organisations for volunteering
In 2017, SAS employees in 16 countries volunteered for almost 30,000 organisations as the #GivingTuesday initiative. They raised $300 million in the process.
9) SAS programming software can read other statistical files
If you learn SAS, you can also handle data files created by other packages like SPSS, Excel, Systat and incorporate those in the present system.
10) More than 200 components present
From basic procedures to graphics, data mining, quality control, the SAS software suite has over 200 components.
11) Free learning resources in more than 120 countries
More than 3 million teachers and students access online resources to get prepared for a technology-driven workforce.
12) 65 Analytics Degree Programs worldwide
With the aim to help people learn SAS and other analytical skills, the company has helped to launch 72 masters and undergraduate courses. There also are 172 certification programs.
13) 4000+ people got trained in using analytics
During the guest lectures to universities and various colleges in 2017, more than 4000 students and professors learnt their way into analytics.
14) SAS is more than 40 years old
From its initial release in 1976, SAS programming has been present in the market for 42 years now. One more reason to learn SAS and trust its analysis.
15) Free educational software
By 2017, there were 1.45 million registrations on its free SAS University Edition and SAS OnDemand for Academics software.
16) SAS is easy-to-use
The point-and-click interface of SAS – the SAS Enterprise Guide generates codes to analyse data without the need of programming experience.
Even though with so many features, it’s easy to learn SAS and then, use it for various analysis.

How Does Facebook Identify Where You Are From Your Profile Photo?

We all know that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is strongly passionate about Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, but how has that impacted our everyday online social life?
You may think you’re just uploading a photo, but facebook knows how many people are there, whether you’re outside or inside, and if you’re smiling.
The technology that Facebook uses, Artificial Intelligence, is a rigorous science that focuses on designing systems that make use of algorithms that are much similar to that of our human brain. AI learns to recognize patterns from large amounts of data and come up with a comprehensive conclusion.

What does that have to do with how Facebook knows if I’m smiling or not?

Facebook is constantly teaching their machines to work better. By using deep learning, they train AI to structure through various processing layers and understanding an abstract representation of what the data could be. By using their system called “convolutional neural network”, the computer is able to go through layers of units and understand whether there is a dog in a photo.

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Facebook works through layers. In the first layer, it is able to identify the edges of objects. In the second layer, it is able to detect combinations and identify it to be an eye in a face or a window in a plane. The next layer combines these further and identifies them to be either an entire face or a wing on a plane. The final layer is able to further detect these combinations and identifies if it is a person or a plane.
The network needs to be able to read the labels on the database and identify which of these are labeled as humans or plants. The system learns to associate the input with the label. The way facebook works is that it is able to now identify not only that there are humans in a photo, but how many humans, whether they are indoors or outdoors, and their actions, i.e. if they are sitting or standing.
However, a photograph that has been uploaded may need to be completely zoomed in for Facebook’s AI to understand intricacies if a person is smiling or not.

It may not always be perfect in its recognition, but it’s getting there.
A lot of information can be extracted from a photograph. Facebook is only going to get better with its AI and making use of big data.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is a concept that will be looked at in Imarticus’s Data Science Prodegree. This course is a cutting-edge program designed and delivered in collaboration with Genpact, a leader in Analytics solutions. Students get their hands-on learning with 6 industry projects and work with industry mentors.

Written by Tenaz Shanice Cardoz, Marketing & Communications.


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Basics About Topic Modelling As A Data Analytics Technique

The Data Science industry has brought about various new avenues into the world of business and internet of things. Here, data analytics as a field, basically deals with extracting ‘information’ from all the obtained data. With rapid digitalization and increasing of the boundaries of the virtual world, the generation and availability of data is on an all-time high. While some of this data might be pre-processed and structured, most of it is just not structured at all. This causes a lot of difficulties when it comes to the part, where relevant and important information is required. That’s where the tools and technologies of the data analytics industry come into play. These are powerful methods, developed by technology and can be used for sifting through the volumes of data and sniffing out, exactly what a professional is looking for. One of the subsets of these technology is the field of text mining, which basically deals with the technique known as Topic Modelling.
This process mainly deals with, identifying topics present in a text object and deriving hidden patterns automatically, thus aiding in the betterment of decision making. This process differs from other run of the mill text mining approaches, which basically deal with regular search techniques or keywords searching techniques based on any random dictionary. A specific bunch of words that is supposed to be found and observed by a professional, is known as “topics”, which usually are present in large clusters of texts. Topic modelling is the unsupervised approach to performing the above mentioned action, with only the machine and no manual help.
Data Science CourseTopics in other words are, “a pattern of co-occuring terms in a corpus, which keeps repeating itself”. For instance

while building a topic model for healthcare, it should be devised in such a way that it results in words like, health, doctor, patient, hospital and other related words. These topic models are very useful when it comes to processes such as, document clustering, organizing large blocks of textual data, feature selection and retrieval of information from unstructured text and so on. What makes this technique so very important is that it can be used in almost any field from print media to marketing and still be relevant and product centric. For example, there are top gun newspaper publishing houses like, The New York Times, who have a team working on perfecting topic models so as to boost their article recommendations for users. There are a lot of advanced HR teams dabbling in this sector by trying to use it to match perfect candidates, with perfect job profiles
These text models are also used in various other applications such as organization of large datasets of emails, customer reviews and user social media profiles. These are some of the reasons why professionals specializing in this technique are gradually becoming sought after. As the demand of companies rises, the amount of people opting to get trained in these techniques also goes up. Imarticus Learning has various industry intensive course offerings for various data analytics tools like Python, which uses this topic modeling technique most extensively.