Predictive Modeling with SAS Enterprise Miner: Practical Solutions for Business Applications Review

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(More customer reviews)Excellent book with detailed illustration of steps using Eminer. Great for users of Eminer with understanding of data mining methods.

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Predictive Modeling with SAS Enterprise Miner: Practical Solutions for Business Applications demonstrates how to make the fullest use of SAS Enterprise Miner software. Kattamuri Sarma provides an in-depth explanation of the methodology and the theory behind each tool that he covers, and then shows you how the software performs the tasks. Step by step, you'll be able to compare manual calculations with the calculations that are performed by SAS Enterprise Miner. Examples from the insurance and banking industries are based on simulated, but realistic, data. The approaches discussed in this book are relevant to any industry.
Here are a few of the topics discussed in detail:
data collection and data cleaning
data exploration
decision trees and regression trees
logistic regression models
neural networks
variable selection and variable transformation

You need this book if you are a graduate student interested in predictive modeling, an expert in data mining who is not familiar with SAS Enterprise Miner, or a business analyst who needs an introduction to predictive modeling using SAS Enterprise Miner. To get the most from this book, you should be familiar with elements of statistical inference and probability, simple algebra, ordinary least squares, logistic regression, and Base SAS software.

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Modeling Survival Data: Extending the Cox Model (Statistics for Biology and Health) Review

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(More customer reviews)Terry Therneau is a research statistician at the Mayo Clinic and Patricia Grambsch is a Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota. The Cox proportional hazards model has been one of the key methods for analyzing survival data with covariates for the last 25 years. Proportionality is a key assumption that limits its use. There has long been a need to find methods which diagnose when the hazard rates are not proportional and provide alternative methods in such situations. Using the theory of counting processes the authors are able to extend the Cox model to more general situations including multiple/correlated event data using either marginal models or random effects (frailty) models. Time dependent covariates are also covered. Some of the theory of martigales and counting processes is included to make the book self-contained. Generalized residuals are used to identify outlying and influential observations (analogous to ordinary regression) and also to assess the proportional hazards assumption.
Although the topics are advanced and the mathematical level is high the book is designed for practitioners, emphasizing applications and providing numerous examples, many from the authors' experience. Statistical analyses are done in SAS and SPlus. The authors tend to use SAS for data management and analysis and SPlus for diagnostics and other plots. Therneau is an expert programmer who has written much of the necessary software in both systems.
Therneau gave an excellent short course that I attended a couple of years ago at the Joint Statistical Meetings based on a draft of the text. The finished product is as good as I expected.
The appendices include SAS and S-Plus tutorials on survival analysis and provide SAS Macros and S functions to apply the new methodology.
The book is now (December 2008) in its 6th printing which is another testament to its value and popularity and a nice deal at amazon's current price of $87. But O'Quigley's book is out now too. So maybe Terry and Patricia should be thinking about doing a revision if they don't already have one in the works.


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This book is for statistical practitioners, particularly those who design and analyze studies for survival and event history data. Building on recent developments motivated by counting process and martingale theory, it shows the reader how to extend the Cox model to analyze multiple/correlated event data using marginal and random effects. The focus is on actual data examples, the analysis and interpretation of results, and computation. The book shows how these new methods can be implemented in SAS and S-Plus, including computer code, worked examples, and data sets.

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A Step-by-Step Approach to Using the SAS System for Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling Review

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(More customer reviews)This book does an outstanding job of taking someone that is somewhat rusty in advanced multivariate techniques and turning them into a conversant and competent modeler. Larry Hatcher uses plain English to explain what a technique may be used for, what the required SAS code is, what the output should look like, and how the output can be interpreted. I'd strongly recommend this book for anyone taking a structural equation modeling course or wishing to apply this technique in research.

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Packed with concrete examples, Larry Hatcher's Step-by-Step Approach to Using SAS for Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling provides an introduction to more advanced statistical procedures and includes handy appendixes that give basic instruction in using SAS. Novice SAS users will find all they need in this one volume to master SAS basics and to move into advanced statistical analyses. Featured is a simple, step-by-step approach to testing structural equation models with latent variables using the CALIS procedure. The following topics are explained in easy-to-understand terms: exploratory factor analysis, principal component analysis, and developing measurement models with confirmatory factor analysis. Other topics of note include "LISREL-type" analyses with the user-friendly PROC CALIS and solving problems encountered in real-world social science research.

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Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis: Modeling Change and Event Occurrence Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is, bar none, the best book on longitudinal analysis in social sciences.
The book has three outstanding features that make it the must-have for researchers who conduct longitudinal studies. First, the book has numerous examples that use data from real studies, collected by prominent scholars in this area. With the help of the accompanying website at UCLA, you will learn how to set up data files, which is crucial in longitudinal analysis. The sample codes and data files in SAS, SPSS, Stata, MLwiN, Mplus, HLM, and Splus will allow you to replicate the analyses. The authors use every effort to explain the results in plain, understandable language. They use a lot of graphs and tables to compare different nested models and help you to choose the one that best describes your data. It feels like you have an excellent tutor by your side when you are reading this book.
Second, the coverage of this book is comprehensive. Part I covers the regular growth curve modeling and multilevel modeling, with a few chapters dealing with time-varying covariates, discontinuous and nonlinear change. Part II covers discrete-time and continuous-time survival analysis. If you are conducting a longitudinal study, chances are you will find a technique in this book that suits you just right.
Third, the book is quite deep. Although it gears toward applications of different longitudinal analyses, it is no cakewalk. You need at least some background in multiple regression and multivariate statistics. I think the treatment of mathematics (both concepts and formulas) is just right. In some sections you may need to revisit them often in order to fully understand the subject.


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Change is constant in everyday life.Infants crawl and then walk, children learn to read and write, teenagers mature in myriad ways, the elderly become frail and forgetful.Beyond these natural processes and events, external forces and interventions instigate and disrupt change:test scores may rise after a coaching course, drug abusers may remain abstinent after residential treatment. By charting changes over time and investigating whether and when events occur, researchers reveal the temporal rhythms of our lives. Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis is a much-needed professional book for empirical researchers and graduate students in the behavioral, social, and biomedical sciences.It offers the first accessible in-depth presentation of two of today's most popular statistical methods: multilevel models for individual change and hazard/survival models for event occurrence (in both discrete- and continuous-time). Using clear, concise prose and real data sets from published studies, the authors take you step by step through complete analyses, from simple exploratory displays that reveal underlying patterns through sophisticated specifications of complex statistical models. Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis offers readers a private consultation session with internationally recognized experts and represents a unique contribution to the literature on quantitative empirical methods. Visit http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/examples/alda.htm for: Downloadable data sets Library of computer programs in SAS, SPSS, Stata, HLM, MLwiN, and more Additional material for data analysis

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Multilevel Analysis: An Introduction to Basic and Advanced Multilevel Modeling Review

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(More customer reviews)Snijders and Bosker's Multilevel Analysis is mathematically demanding but more readable than Raudenbush and Bryk's Hierarchical Linear Models. Snijders and Bosker's text would be much more useful for the less-experienced reader if it contained a directory identifying essential material. As is often the case with books of this kind, it is difficult to distinguish between really important topics, those crucial to understanding multilevel models, and ancillary topics which can be treated as non-essential, at least for the first pass through this dense and difficult material.
It would also help if the authors located multilevel modeling within a statistical context likely to contain material that readers already understand. As it is, multilevel analysis is treated as a separate and new topic, and is readily accessible only to those with generalized mathematical maturity.
The authors do, however, cover a broad range of pertinent material. Thus, while it is not a good choice for beginners looking for a self-instructional tool, the statistically sophisticated reader will find it to be an excellent reference. While just as difficult to understand as the rest of the book, Snijders and Bosker's develop some really informative and interesting examples of three-level models.
This text has been in print for a decade, and is still widely used. I've found that as I become more familiar with multilevel modeling, the book becomes more valuable.

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The Second Edition of this classic text introduces the main methods, techniques, and issues involved in carrying out multilevel modeling and analysis. Snijders and Boskers' book is an applied, authoritative, and accessible introduction to the topic, providing readers with a clear conceptual and practical understanding of all the main issues involved in designing multilevel studies and conducting multilevel analysis. This book has been comprehensively revised and updated since the last edition, and now includes guides to modeling using HLM, MLwiN, SAS, Stata including GLLAMM, R, SPSS, Mplus, WinBugs, Latent Gold, and Mix.

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