Acknowledgments

At the beginning of this project, I had many discussions with my son Ravi Sarma about practical aspects of modeling techniques, especially neural networks and decision trees. Ravi, who was then a graduate student at MIT working on a neural networks project, read the manuscript at several stages and contributed editorial assistance, in-depth questions, and insightful comments that greatly improved the text. Ravi has been a source of encouragement and intellectual support during the entire project.

I am grateful to Linda Kellogg for helping me in the customized installation of various versions of SAS Enterprise Miner and for coming to my rescue whenever I faced a technical question. The second edition of this book would not have been possible without Linda’s generous help.

Many thanks go to other SAS technical support personnel who thoroughly answered my questions about different nodes of the SAS Enterprise Miner.

In addition, I would like to thank Joan Keyser for her outstanding editorial work. I would like to thank Goutam Chakraborty who, in addition to reviewing the book, provided me very positive suggestions for making improvements. I would like to thank Russell Albright for generously reviewing the complex topic of text mining.

I would like to thank Julie Platt and Stacey Hamilton for their solid support and extraordinary patience when I was revising the book several times with various versions of the SAS Enterprise Miner.

I would like to thank my wife, Lokamatha, for putting up with me while I spent many weekends and holidays working on this book.