Complementing SAS® Software with S-PLUS 6.2 in Clinical and Non-clinical Environments

Speaker: Michael O'Connell, Ph.D., Director BioPharm Solutions, Insightful Corporation

Presented: Thursday, March 4th

Listen to the archived Web cast.

• S-PLUS Clinical Pack for SAS Users
• Presentation materials [3.9MB PDF]

Abstract
SAS® software and S-PLUS are widely used together as a validated clinical data analysis platform. A typical use case involves the SAS software data step for data transformation and PROC Tabulate to provide simple tabular summaries; and S-PLUS to provide graphical summaries and advanced analytics, e.g. survival analysis, from the transformed SAS software datasets.

This webinar describes the validated SAS software and S-PLUS environment including:

• Development and production environments for S-PLUS and SAS software: directory structures and source code control
  
• Batch analyses using S-PLUS and SAS software, including automated error checking of S-PLUS and SAS software verbose log files
  
• XML data transport between S-PLUS and SAS software
  
• S-PLUS analysis and visualization of data managed and transformed using SAS software
  
• Calling S-PLUS from SAS software and combining S-PLUS graphics with SAS software tabular output e.g. as SAS ODS html
  
• Calling SAS software from S-PLUS for data transformation and analysis
  
• Advanced analysis and visualization of SAS software data using S-PLUS e.g. ordinal regression, survival analysis and graphlets

Biostatisticians and programmers have enormous responsibilities in the management and analysis of clinical data. On one hand, they need a creative statistical and graphical analysis sand-box in order to understand and demonstrate clinical effects throughout their project teams. On the other hand, they must work in a regulated, validated, data management and analysis environment for production analysis. By combining S-PLUS and SAS software, a highly efficient environment for both exploratory and production requirements can be created which leverages the strengths of each tool. The combined S-PLUS and SAS software environment facilitates rapid identification and visualization of the fundamental safety and efficacy issues, while providing a robust framework for validated statistical analysis and reporting.

Presenter Information
Michael O'Connell, Ph.D., is director of Biopharmaceutical Solutions at Insightful Corporation. He has more than 15 years experience in clinical informatics and the health-care statistics arena, having published more than 40 papers on statistics, data mining and health-care applications. This has included statistical methods work in the areas of non-parametric regression, experimental design, calibration and (generalized linear) mixed models.