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MWSUG 2018 Training Classes
MWSUG offers a full menu of pre-conference training courses. These training classes are learning opportunities which allow you to delve more deeply into a topic. Classes are offered on the Saturday and Sunday prior to the conference.
| Registration Type | Half Day | Full Day | Two Day Bundle - BEST VALUE! |
| Conference Attendee | $175 | $350 | $650 |
| Without Conference | $275 | $550 | $1,000 |
| Full-Time Student | $100 | $200 | N/A |
To register for a training class, please select the corresponding class during the registration process. Seating for the training classes are limited and registration will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.
The two day bundle price may be used for any combination of training courses equivalent to two full days (four half days).
Courses Offered
Saturday, September 29, 2018
| Course Title (click for description) | Instructor(s) (click for bio) | Time |
| Statistics 101: Introduction to Statistical Principles and Quantitative Analytics using SAS/STAT® | Michael G. Wilson | 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM |
| A Practical Guide to Manipulating Clinical Trial Data with SAS | Josh Horstman | 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM CANCELLED |
| Custom Reporting with PROC REPORT and the ODS Excel Destination | Kirk Paul Lafler | 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM |
| An Introduction to the Analysis of Survival Data Using the SAS® System | Michael G. Wilson | 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM |
| Advanced PROC SQL Programming Concepts and Techniques | Kirk Paul Lafler | 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM |
| Building Dynamic Programs and Applications Using the SAS® Macro Language | Josh Horstman | 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM |
Sunday, September 30, 2018
| Course Title (click for description) | Instructor(s) (click for bio) | Time |
| An Intro to Data Mining in SAS and JMP (Decision Trees, Neural Networks and Deep Neural Networks) | Russ Lavery | 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM |
| Introductory ADaM Dataset Development: ADSL, OCCDS, and BDS | Nancy Brucken | 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM |
| Creating Advanced Reports in SAS® | Cynthia Zender | 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM |
| Advanced EG | Ben Cochran | 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM CANCELLED |
| Advanced ADaM Dataset Development: Beyond the ADaM IG | Nancy Brucken | 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM |
| Building High-Impact Dashboards Using SAS® Base Software | Kirk Paul Lafler | 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM |
Course Descriptions
Statistics 101: Introduction to Statistical Principles and Quantitative Analytics using SAS/STAT®Michael G. Wilson
Saturday, September 29, 2018, 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Statistical Principles and Quantitative Analytics are investigative tools to extract meaningful information from data reliably and to guide smarter decisions. SAS/STAT has a rich, successful history of making those tools readily available and allowing for rapid customization. In this course, implementation of procedure-based tools using SAS/STAT will be introduced. Understanding fundamental concepts will be emphasized over mathematical derivation and formulae. The material in this course is a prerequisite to many statistical courses. At the conclusion of the course, participants will be able to communicate with statisticians more effectively, better clarify specific report requirements and have an improved understanding of statistical material in multidisciplinary discussions and reports.
A Practical Guide to Manipulating Clinical Trial Data with SAS
Josh Horstman
Saturday, September 29, 2018, 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
CANCELLED
The SAS System provides powerful tools for the analysis and reporting of clinical data. However, our data often must be merged, sorted, flipped, flopped, rearranged, or otherwise manipulated before reporting and analysis can proceed. This half-day course will teach you essential techniques for using SAS to get your data into the format and structure you need for the task at hand. We'll cover common clinical programming situations such as merging datasets, transposing data from horizontal to vertical (or vice-versa), working with dates, baseline flagging, deriving change from baseline, computing elapsed time since the last dose prior to an event, visit slotting, imputation, multi-level summarization of subject counts, and much more. Examples will be primarily geared toward working in a CDISC setting, but the programming methodologies covered are not limited to that context. As we evaluate different methods, we'll also discuss considerations such as efficiency and reusability.
Custom Reporting with PROC REPORT and the ODS Excel Destination
Kirk Paul Lafler
Saturday, September 29, 2018, 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
This new and popular course teaches SAS® users an assortment of techniques to create custom reports and specialized output using PROC REPORT and the ODS Excel destination. Attendees learn how to create detail and summary reports using PROC REPORT; acquire useful Output Delivery System (ODS) skills; combine PROC REPORT and the powerful ODS Excel destination to produce quick and formatted detail and summary Excel workbook results; customize output and results with SAS-supplied styles; compute subtotals and totals at the end of a report using a COMPUTE Block; calculate percentages; produce statistics for analysis variables; apply conditional logic to control summary output rows; add background images; build custom autofilter drill-down (interactive) reports and Excel workbooks; and add traffic lighting scenarios to Excel workbooks.
An Introduction to the Analysis of Survival Data Using the SAS® System
Michael G. Wilson
Saturday, September 29, 2018, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
This course discusses survival analysis concepts with an emphasis on health care problems. During this course, we will introduce statistical methods for the survival analysis, that is, the analysis of studies where the primary outcome is time-to-event. In this course a review of parametric, nonparametric and semi-parametric approaches will be offered. The principal goal of this course, however, is to illustrate the implementation of these methods using SAS®. Specifically, we will use methods for estimating survival time (Kaplan-Meier), comparing survival between subgroups (logrank test), and modeling survival curves (Cox proportional hazards regression). Emphasis will be placed on the concepts of how time is measured (e.g., time since entry, attained age, and calendar time), right censoring, competing risks when comparing subgroups, and assessing the assumption of proportional hazards when modeling. The SAS products used in this paper are SAS/Base, and SAS/STAT, with no limitation of operating systems.
Advanced PROC SQL Programming Concepts and Techniques
Kirk Paul Lafler
Saturday, September 29, 2018, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
The power of PROC SQL as a database programming language is well known. This instructor-led course teaches advanced PROC SQL concepts and programming techniques to exploit SQL as a programming language to access, manipulate, restructure and validate data. Attendees learn how to construct queries to identify and access FIRST.row, LAST.row, and BETWEEN.rows during By-group processing; perform “fuzzy” matching programming techniques; create and explore the application of “virtual” tables known as views; apply rule-based and cost-based optimization strategies; influence the optimizer to choose from the available join algorithms; apply strategies associated with the design and creation of simple and composite indexes; construct table validation rules using table integrity constraints; and explore “select” query performance tuning techniques.
Building Dynamic Programs and Applications Using the SAS® Macro Language
Josh Horstman
Saturday, September 29, 2018, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
This seminar shows you how to take advantage of SAS Macro Language capabilities that enable you to write dynamic programs and applications. By mastering the concepts and techniques presented in this class your programs will become free of hard-coded data dependencies, thus eliminating the need to re-write the code every time a data set name, variable name, or other data attribute, changes. Let “them” change the project's specifications as often as “they” want…your code is ready!
The dynamic programming techniques that you will learn about during this seminar:
- Are flexible and are easily adaptable to changing data structures, data table names, and variable (field) attributes
- Reduce maintenance requirements by removing data dependencies from within the programs
- Provide significant resource savings during program/application development cycles
- Gives the end-user extensive control over program execution by using tables such as SAS data dictionaries, SAS data sets, and Excel tables
- Reduce program validation efforts by providing reusable and generalized code that can be applied to many different applications
- Establish controlled data environments, thus insuring data integrity throughout your organization
An Intro to Data Mining in SAS and JMP (Decision Trees, Neural Networks and Deep Neural Networks)
Russ Lavery
Sunday, September 30, 2018, 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
This course explores theory and practice for several of the “trending” machine learning techniques. Using pictures and examples (and some theory), this course explores decision trees, regression trees, bootstrap forest, boosted trees, neural nets, deep neural nets, naïve Bayesian classifiers/regressors, as well as the KNN algorithm.
Introductory ADaM Dataset Development: ADSL, OCCDS, and BDS
Nancy Brucken
Sunday, September 30, 2018, 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
This half-day seminar introduces attendees to CDISC ADaM and the ADaM documents. We will discuss how ADaM fits into the clinical process, and describe the key principles of ADaM. We will cover how to apply the basic ADaM concepts, rules, recommended best practices, and the four types of ADaM metadata. The seminar then explains the ADSL, OCCDS and BDS models. Submission deliverables like ADRG and ADaM define.xml will be discussed as well. A basic understanding of SDTM and regulatory submission needs is expected.
Creating Advanced Reports in SAS®
Cynthia Zender
Sunday, September 30, 2018, 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
This tutorial describes how to produce several types of advanced reports using SAS. PROC REPORT and the Output Delivery System are used to create one of the standard demographic reports popular for displaying research tables. In addition, an alternate method for demographic reports using the DATA step and ODS TABLE template method is covered. The demographic report is combined with several graphs using ODS LAYOUT. Additional graphic reports will be covered: incorporating sparkline bars into PROC REPORT output; inserting SGPLOT graphs into a REPORT table and producing FOREST plots using PROC SGPLOT. The new report writing interface and ODS LAYOUT will be covered in several examples of how to create output with simple tables, and tables and graphs on the same report page. All report output is produced using ODS, including style attributes that are used extensively to customize the reports. Procedures/topics to be covered include: ODS, REPORT, FORMAT, RWI and DATA _NULL_ programming.
Advanced EG
Ben Cochran
Sunday, September 30, 2018, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
CANCELLED
This course goes beyond the basics with EG. It starts out by looking at some tasks that are not included in the introduction course, such as Summary Tables and List Report. Much time is given to the topic of Prompts. This course covers the many types of prompts and how to create and use them. The next major topic is using SAS Functions to create new columns. This course looks at a few numeric as well as character handling functions. Next, the course turns back to looking at Tasks. Specifically tasks that can manipulate data like appending tables and grouping data. Writing SAS programs is covered as the next major topic, and then finally, the course looks at ideas such as conditional processing within the Process Flow window and switching the source data for your tasks.
Advanced ADaM Dataset Development: Beyond the ADaM IG
Nancy Brucken
Sunday, September 30, 2018, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
This half-day course takes you beyond the examples in the ADaM Implementation Guide (ADaM IG), and shows you how to create analysis-ready datasets to meet more complex analysis requirements. Among the topics to be discussed are the addition of columns versus rows, approaches for handling multiple baseline definitions, creation of intermediate datasets while maintaining traceability back to SDTM, and avoidance of circular processing logic in ADSL. A working knowledge of basic ADaM structures and principles is expected.
Building High-Impact Dashboards Using SAS® Base Software
Kirk Paul Lafler
Sunday, September 30, 2018, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Organizations around the world develop static and interactive reports, spreadsheets and dashboards for the purpose of displaying the current status of “point-in-time” data, charts, tables, reports, statistics, scorecards, metrics and key performance indicators. Effectively designed dashboards, along with the code behind them, involves the extraction of data from a variety of sources, the performance of a series of data cleaning steps, restructuring and reformatting data, and the production of charts, tables and reports with the purpose of highlighting important information, numbers, tables, statistics, metrics, performance information and other essential content on a single screen. This instructor-led course explores the best practice programming techniques to build static and interactive drill-down (interactive) dashboards (containing hyperlinks) using Base-SAS® software to drive awareness and understanding of summary and detail results. Attendees learn how to create high-impact dashboards with a purpose not in weeks or months, but in hours, using the DATA step; PROC FORMAT; PROC PRINT; PROC REPORT; PROC MEANS; PROC SQL; Output Delivery System (ODS); the macro language; Statistical Graphic procedures: PROC SGPLOT, PROC SGSCATTER, ]PROC SGPANEL, and PROC SGRENDER; Graphics Template Language (GTL); and PROC TEMPLATE.
Instructor Biographies
Nancy Brucken
Nancy Brucken has been a statistical programmer in the pharmaceutical industry for over 20 years, on both the pharmaceutical company and CRO sides, and a member of the ADaM Occurrence Structure sub-team for the past 2 years. She is a frequent presenter at local and regional SAS conferences, a proud graduate of Marietta College, and a devout Ohio State Buckeyes fan.
Ben Cochran
After more than 11 years with SAS Institute in the Professional Services (as an Instructor) and Marketing Departments (as Marketing Manager for the SAS/EIS product), Ben Cochran left to start his own consulting and SAS Training business in the fall of 1996 – The Bedford Group. As an affiliate member of SAS Institute’s Alliance Partner Program, Ben has been involved in many teaching and consulting projects over the last 20+ years. Ben has authored and presented several papers at SUGI, SGF, and regional user groups on a variety of topics since 1988.
Josh Horstman
Josh Horstman is an independent statistical programmer based in Indianapolis with 20 years' experience using SAS in the life sciences industry. He is a SAS Certified Programmer specializing in analyzing clinical trial data, and his clients have included major pharmaceutical corporations, biotech companies, and research organizations. Josh loves coding and has enjoyed presenting numerous times at SAS Global Forum, PharmaSUG, MWSUG, and other SAS User Group meetings.
Kirk Lafler
Kirk Paul Lafler has been programming in SAS® since 1979 and is consultant and founder of Software Intelligence Corporation. Kirk teaches SAS programming classes at UC San Diego Extension and to the public, is a SAS Certified Professional, application developer, programmer, data analyst, mentor, and provider of IT consulting services and education to SAS users around the world. As the author of six books including Google® Search Complete! (Odyssey Press. 2014) and PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS, Second Edition (SAS Institute. 2013); Kirk has written hundreds of papers and articles; been an Invited speaker at hundreds of SAS International, regional, special-interest, local, and in-house user group conferences/meetings; and is the recipient of 25 “Best” contributed paper, hands-on workshop (HOW), and poster awards.
Russ Lavery
Russ Lavery is a frequent and multiple award-winning presenter at SAS user groups. He has been a technical reviewer on five books on SAS and statistical topics. He has over 25 years of experience using SAS and is still studying. Russ is a contractor and lives outside Philadelphia, PA, where he occasionally teaches as an adjunct in the Drexel University analytic program and dances frequently.
Michael G. Wilson
Michael G. Wilson has been a practicing statistician using SAS/STAT for 29 years. In addition, he has been a part-time faculty and adjunct faculty member for the past 12 years teaching statistics at the university, advanced graduate and medical school levels. Michael has co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed research journal articles. Currently, he is an independent biostatistician and co-investigator of NIH and VA studies.
Cynthia Zender
Cynthia Zender has been with SAS since 1996 as an instructor and course developer. She currently serves as the Curriculum Manager for the Report Writing and Output Delivery System curriculum. Cynthia is a frequent speaker at SAS Global Forum and at regional SAS user groups. She is working on an "SG" procedure graphics course, as well as a SAS/Graph course. Cynthia is a SAS Certified Professional, with over 25 years of experience programming and reporting with SAS. Prior to joining SAS, she worked with a variety of industries (including education, public utilities, and telecom), using SAS for application development and report writing.