Kaggle is a platform for analytics and data science. It presents a series of competitions which are free to enter and often offer cash prizes. The competitions provide a great way to learn about programming data analysis and machine learning.

One of its most popular competitions involves using a dataset of subject characteristics to predict which passengers survived the sinking of the Titanics. Kaggle provides a series of tutorials explaining how to get started on this problem using Excel, Python or R, however there is no tutorial on how to get started with SAS.

SAS recently released SAS University Edition. It is a free version of SAS designed for those interested in learning to work with the SAS language. It includes Base SAS, SAS Stat, SAS Access, SAS IML and SAS Studio. It can be downloaded from the SAS website here.

We’ve decided to take advantage of the release of SAS University Edition to provide a series of introductory tutorials which explain how to use SAS to enter the Kaggle – Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster competition. The tutorials are aimed at those people who are new to the SAS language and are interested in learning more. They will be posted here over the next few days.