Kattamuri S. Sarma, PhD, is an economist and statistician with 30 years of experience in American business, including stints with IBM and AT&T. He is the founder and president of Ecostat Research Corp., a consulting firm specializing in predictive modeling and forecasting. Over the years, Dr. Sarma has developed predictive models for the banking, insurance, telecommunication, and technology industries. He has been a SAS user since 1992, and he has extensive experience with multivariate statistical methods, econometrics, decision trees, and data mining with neural networks. The author of numerous professional papers and publications, Dr. Sarma is a SAS Certified Professional and a SAS Alliance Partner. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and his master's degree in economic statistics from universities in India. Dr. Sarma received his PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked under the supervision of Nobel Laureate Lawrence R. Klein.