PharmaSUG 2025 Training Seminar

Data is everywhere! And with data most everyone is aware that it frequently contains an assortment of data-related and/or quality issues that can make it difficult to work with and, even more troubling, impact decision-making activities. So, what are some of these data issues, you ask? For starters, data can be inaccurate, inconsistent, incomplete, duplicate, irrelevant, outdated, and ambiguous. If you and/or your organization have experienced or are currently experiencing any data quality issues with your data, then I invite you to attend a seminar I will be teaching at PharmaSUG 2025, A Step-by-Step Introduction to Data Cleaning Using Excel, Python, R, and SAS?, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025 from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM in San Diego, California.

A Step-by-Step Intro to Data Cleaning Using Excel, Python, R, and SAS?

Kirk Paul Lafler Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM

If you are spending too much time and money dealing with data quality issues, then this seminar is for you. SAS? users often turn to off-the-shelf or user-built tools to handle messy data issues. Unfortunately, and all too often, many tools in use today fall short and/or have steep learning curves to master. This seminar explores the problems found in data, the types of data quality issues, and the various programming techniques users can learn and use to clean their data, once and for all. Attendees learn how to check and clean character and numeric data issues; handle missing data; remove duplicate data based on the row’s values and/or keys; read and write date/time variables; apply data integrity rules to prevent messy data from continuing to creep into a spreadsheet, dataframe, and/or data set (or table); and automate the data cleaning process to identify and fix errors in data while improving scale.

Seminar Topics

The following topics are introduced in this seminar:

• Data importation techniques to access, identify, and parse data in various data formats including CSV, XLSX, JSON, and XML.
• Data preparation techniques for data discovery, data cleaning, and data transformation.
• The automation of data cleaning can reduce the workload and save time, improve an organization’s productivity, help to enhance the cleaning process’s accuracy and consistency, and provide an organization with additional time to conduct data analysis and interpretation.
• Excel data cleaning topics include the application of data importation, removing duplicates, standardizing formats, streamlining case, removing extraneous spaces, splitting delimited data, finding and replacing data values, extracting prefixes and suffixes, checking for spelling and typos, and imputing missing values.
• Python data cleaning topics include the application of data importation, removing duplicates, standardizing formats, streamlining case, removing extraneous spaces, splitting delimited data, finding and replacing data values, extracting prefixes and suffixes, checking for spelling and typos, and imputing missing values.
• R data cleaning topics include the application of data importation, removing duplicates, standardizing formats, streamlining case, removing extraneous spaces, splitting delimited data, finding and replacing data values, extracting prefixes and suffixes, checking for spelling and typos, and imputing missing values.
• SAS data cleaning topics include the application of importing data with PROC IMPORT; examining PROC CONTENTS and Metadata; performing exploratory data analysis (EDA) with PROC FREQ, PROC MEANS, PROC PRINT, PROC SORT, PROC SQL, PROC SUMMARY, and DATA step logic and programming techniques including BY-group and FIRST. and LAST. processing; numerous SAS functions to clean data issues and anomalies; and macro language techniques.

Seminar Registration

https://pharmasug.org/conferences/pharmasug-2025-us/registration-and-rates/

Instructor Bio - Kirk Paul Lafler

Kirk Paul Lafler is a consultant, developer, programmer, educator, and data scientist; and teaches SAS Programming and Data Management in the Statistics Department at San Diego State University. Kirk also provides project-based consulting and programming services to client organizations in a variety of industries including healthcare, life sciences, and business; and teaches “virtual” and “live” SAS, SQL, Python, Database Management Systems (DBMS) technologies (e.g., Oracle, SQL-Server, Teradata, MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, AWS), Excel, R, cloud-based technologies, and other software and tools. Currently, Kirk serves as the Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS) Executive Committee (EC) Open-Source Advocate and Coordinator and is actively involved with several proprietary and open-source software user groups and conference committees. Kirk is the author of several books including the popular PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS, Third Edition (SAS Press. 2019). He is also an Invited speaker, educator, keynote, and leader; and is the recipient of 29 “Best” contributed paper, hands on workshop (HOW), and poster awards.

Contact Information

[email protected]

https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/kirkpaullafler/