SAS Global Forum 2009 Recap: Monday

This post will recap what I did at SAS Global Forum on Monday. You can follow my as-it-happens commentary by following the #SGF09 channel on Twitter.

Getting to the conference center and picking up my registration packet (I got in late Sunday night) was a snap, due to the fact that my hotel offers a free shuttle to and from the conference center. I thought I'd have to take a cab every day.

The first part of keynote address was pretty informative, even if it did feel like a late-night infomercial. Some of the more interesting products showcased were all about integration: integrating SAS with Sharepoint, text mining tools, R, and Flash. The future of SAS will be visually much different than it is now, I think.

Dave Barry, the keynote speaker, was hilarious, as usual. When I was younger I used to read his column every week, and it was neat to hear him speaking in the style in which he writes. It was like one of his columns had come to life. As I said, hilarious. I'm not sure his talk had much to do with SAS or analytics, but it was a nice bit of entertainment for all us conference attendees.

The first session I attended was about design of experiments (DOE) from Milliken. He had a very good message, that a modeler needs to consider all sources of possible variation that can be accounted for in experiments, whether it's before or after the actual experiment takes place. Even for someone in retail, the message is meaningful, because I should get all the details of experiments (which have usually already happened) so that I know how to properly apply blocking to the analysis. He gave plenty of good examples but I wish he had focused a bit more on theory.

The second session I attended, after lunch, was on time series, given by none other than David Dickey, cocreator of the Dickey-Fuller test. Not only was it great to hear about time series from someone who's contributed so much to the field, but his talk was suprisingly funny and accessible. His talk was mainly filled with examples and not much on theory, but it was still very informative. We learned about the advantages and disadvantages of different types of time-series models. My favorite session so far.

I returned to the topic of DOE for my next session, which was the Basics of DOE for Multivariate Analysis, from Figard. This talk was essentially just a rehash of what Milliken said in the morning session about how to design experiments and analyze them afterwards to identify all systematic sources of variation. The value added from this talk was that Figard presented a checklist to go through when designing and analyzing an experiment to find truly global optima instead of local optima.

My last session of the day was on optimizing marketing mix, from Bhattacharya. This presentation was only so-so. The presenter spoke very quickly and was done in 30 minutes when 50 were allotted. She could have benefitted from slowing down a little. Going through so much content so quickly meant that very little of it stuck. It felt like she had written a large macro to analyze optimal marketing mix, then wrote up a run of the macro. It felt a little light on theory and on the example. Her basic point was that the effect of media is usually non-linear, and you need tools to handle non-linear functions.

That was it for the first day. I caught the shuttle back to the hotel, ordered some surprisingly good local Chinese food, and spent the evening catching up on some work and reading the news. It's surprising how much news happens when you're spending all day in conference rooms. I know, I should have been "cooler" and gone to one of the SAS evening events, but I was pretty tired and had some work I had to get done. Don't worry, Tuesday night I'm going out with some fellow attendees to a local tapas place; they have a flamenco show that should be fun.

Next: in a surprising twist, I'll be posting SGF 2009 Recap: Tuesday!