All public courses using SAS are held at SAS, Marlow:

and cost for two-day courses 1000 GBP (plus VAT) per person which includes lunch and refreshments. Reduction to 900 GBP (plus VAT) per person for multiple bookings from the same organisation.

To book a place on a course either click here, or phone +44 (0)118 934 4265, or print and complete an application form (pdf format 115 Kb) .

Course dates for 2008/2009 :

• Propensity Scoring Models: 13th-14th Nov 2008, 12th-13th Feb 2009, 11th-12th June 2009, 5th-6th Nov 2009
  
• Segmentation of a Customer Database: 3rd-4th Nov 2008, 26th-27th March 2009, 24th-25th Sept 2009
  
• Planning & Interpreting of Marketing Campaigns: 18th-19th Sept 2008, 4th-5th June 2009
  

Forecasting Business Trends

Using the SAS^® System

The Course

This course addresses the problem of making forecasts of revenue or demand where any of the following problems may exist:

• There is seasonality that is not exactly in step with the forecasting interval (eg monthly or annual seasonality when weekly forecasts are required, increase in activity at end or beginning of calendar month)
• There are special events that occur at predictable times and have implications for overall revenue or demand or for expenditure of a particular kind (eg holiday periods, Mother/Fathers Day, Valentine's Day)
• There are special 'intervention events' whose impact may be very short, or permanent, or somewhere in between (a new competitor outlet, enhancements to own offer, etc)
• There may be changes to a trend that are likely to skew the forecasts for the future - how can such changes be detected and allowed for
• Forecasts may be needed at different levels (eg initially for different services or products and then aggregated to higher levels, or for individual retail outlets, then for geographical regions, then for the whole business.

We will concentrate mainly on two procedures available in SAS ETS^® - PROC FORECAST for 'cheap and cheerful' forecasting and PROC AUTOREG to allow for complex predictors and to exploit correlated errors. We will also show that the SAS STAT^® procedures PROC GLM and PROC REG can play an important role in the search for efficient models of the systematic effects.

Level of Expertise:

This course is best suited for analysts with some prior modelling experience; no prior knowledge of time series analysis is assumed.