Outside, the Cary, NC sky is gray and winds are blowing freezing rain, but a group of statisticians at SAS are channeling warm green hills and the soft, gold light of a California evening. Team conversations alternate between distributed processing, PROC IMSTAT and how many pairs of shorts to pack.

For the past several months, the Advanced Analytics training team here in Cary have been hard at work developing a course especially for the Strata+ Hadoop World conference entitled Machine Learning and Exploratory Modeling with SAS® and Hadoop. I’m very excited about this unique course. It blends many topics, and focuses exclusively on enhancing and refining students’ analytic skills in Hadoop.

The course will be held in San Jose, CA Feb 17-18 and was created for analytic professionals who want to make the most of their big data with Hadoop and SAS by incorporating high-performance, machine learning algorithms with predictive modeling best practices.

On the first day, we’ll primarily spend time using SAS Visual Analytics and Visual Statistics to perform analyses using the point-and-click interface. Because there will always be a need to do more than you see in the GUI, the second day is devoted to using PROC IMSTAT and High-Performance procedures for predictive modeling and text analytics, and the RECOMMEND procedure to build a recommendation system.

Featuring this course at the Strata conference is the perfect fit and a great value for analytic professionals. Your course registration fee includes a 2-day Expo Hall pass. This gives you the opportunity to network with data science professionals from around the world, who are experienced in many different technologies.  Good news! We are offering a special 30 percent discount to SAS customers. To take advantage of the discount, register using the promo code SASML. I’d love to see you there.