Statistical Analysis System (SAS) Software
The Statistical Analysis System (SAS) software is a computer program that allows its users to perform powerful data analysis on data obtained from research experiments in any field. SAS has become an invaluable tool used currently by students, professors, and within industry to perform data analysis. Some schools have classes dedicated to learning SAS so that students are prepared to analyze their own data once they have graduated and become members of industry or go on to pursue further academic research1.
SAS is a very powerful tool within sensory science. Using SAS you are able to analyze sensory data to find out if the variables being tested in products statistically differ from each other. SAS has no maximum for data entry so difference testing can be computed for projects with very large sample sizes. SAS also allows you to perform data entry and analysis on complicated research models, including nested models1.
SAS has its own programming language with different sets of commands that allow its users a vast number of ways to interpret their data. Some of the more basic functions that SAS can perform include: Uncorrected Sums of Squares, Variance, Standard Deviation, 95% Confidence Intervals, and t-tests among others. Besides these basic functions SAS also allows you to do more complicated difference testing which includes: Analysis of Variance for simple and complex models, Paired t-Test, Expectations of Mean Squares, F Ratios, Duncan’s New Multiple Range Test, Dunnett’s One-tailed and Two-tailed tests, Tukey’s Honest Significant Difference (HSD) Test, Fisher’s Protected Least Significant Difference (LSD) Test, Mean Separations Within Interactions, and Orthogonal Polynomial Comparisons among others. SAS also has the ability to perform regression analysis on any order polynomial and has the ability to graph these regression analyses as well as graph any other data1. UCLA also has a great website for getting help with SAS which can be found at http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/sas/.
References
1 SAS Institute, 2000. SAS SQL Procedure User’s Guide, Version 8, SAS.
