This weekend, lots of SAS authors are going to Las Vegas. The draw is the Analytics 2012 conference. There, several of our authors will lead discussions, including keynote speaker Tim Rey (coauthor of the new SAS Press book Applied Data Mining for Forecasting Using SAS) and Gerhard Svolba (author of Data Quality for Analytics Using SAS and Data Preparation for Analytics Using SAS).

Gerhard Svolba kindly shared details about his forthcoming talk Data Quality for Analytics – and the consequences if it is not as good as you thought with us:

The journey starts with a case study that illustrates the analytical viewpoint on data quality--in which I then apply to real business data quality problems. The first section of my presentation will show that analytics has additional requirements for data and data quality, but also offers many methods to profile and improve your data quality.

The second section will answer the questions: How much data do I need? How do missing values affect predictive power? In my new book “Data Quality for Analytics” I ran a lot of simulation studies with real life data. Based on these simulation studies, my presentation will go beyond the simple “too many missing values are bad for the analysis” message and will quantify the consequences.

After the presentation, attendees will take away:

• Data quality for analytics has more requirements, but also offers more possibilities.
• The analyst should get into the details of data quality features: for example, investigate whether biases are random or systematic, or whether they only occur in the training data, or also in the scoring data.
• Quantity matters but the effort to achieve a certain quantity level and the resulting benefit should be balanced.
• Finally, the journey will show how SAS helps to profile, improve, assess and simulate data quality.

Besides attending presentations from SAS authors, visit the SAS bookstore at the conference (and save money with a special discount) and follow @SASbooks on Twitter for a few onsite book giveaways. Have a wonderful time in Las Vegas!