R for SAS Users is designed to help experienced SAS users learn to process, query, transform and summarize data with R. This course takes a use-case-based approach to walk through the knowledge discovery and data mining process using R. This course has no prerequisites. While we do not cover Microsoft R Server (MRS) during this course, a secondary goal of the course is to prepare users for MRS and its set of tools and capabilities for scalable big data-processing and analytics. This course covers all the requirements to prepare users for MRS training, although we recommend spacing out this course and the MRS for SAS Users course to give participants time to absorb the material.
After completing this course, participants will be able to use R in order to:
- Read and process flat files (CSV) using R
- Clean and prepare data for analysis
- Create new features
- Visualize, explore, and summarize data
While we occasionally draw certain parallels between SAS and R, this course does not teach a user to do a line-by-line (or chunk-by-chunk) conversion of SAS code to R code. Instead, by covering a thorough use-case, we attempt to show how to use R and what best practices to follow. At the end of the course, users should have a solid understanding of how to use R to process and analyze data, and compare and contrast R and SAS in how they deal with data. But there is no doubt that migration legacy code from SAS to R is a challenging task.