SASsy

[.Godspeed.]

Ok, I would much appreciate if anyone employed in an actuarial position who has used SAS in their work could explain to me how exactly you have used it and to what extent. Frequently? Infrequently? Have you used it in modeling certain phenomena? Just basic statistical work? I would really appreciate any feedback since I'm pretty interested in taking a class next semester that would use it pretty intensively. Also, if you could mention what area you're in, that would help. Thanks.

[FSA]

I use it daily. Mostly, I use it to summarize large datasets, though there is some data manipulation that goes on (mapping data to categories, remapping incorrect account numbers, assigning data to modelling cells for use in other programs, merging multiple data sets, etc.). I don't have much call to use the statistical functions at this point, though I have been investigating the logistic regression procedure recently. Most of the jobs I use which do some sort of calculation were inherited programs.

Most of my time is spent in proc merge, proc summary, proc tabulate, and proc print, with input and output of the datasets as the balance.

What I don't like about the output of SAS (or other stat software) is that oftentimes a lot of statistical measures is presented. While that's fine, it can be dangerous if you don't understand what those measures mean, how they were calculated and how they should be interpreted.

I'm in life insurance valuation & financial reporting.