Watch this Ask the Expert session to get an overview of SAS Visual Forecasting, introduce some of the latest developments, and provide a solid foundation for the upcoming webinars.
Watch the Webinar
You will:
- See the different forecasting algorithms available in SAS Visual Forecasting, which includes time series, machine learning, and deep learning methods.
- Get an overview of the open source integration capabilities that allow users to scale their algorithms to run in a distributed manner in SAS Visual Forecasting.
- Understand how to easily create custom events to improve the quality and accuracy of forecasting models.
- Enhance your modeling competitions by automatically selecting the best model per time series across multiple modeling strategies.
- Explore interactive modeling capabilities that allow users to create custom models for individual time series.
- Understand the importance of time series segmentation in enhancing your forecasting accuracy.
The questions from the Q&A segment held at the end of the webinar are listed below and the slides from the webinar are attached.
Q&A
Will you spend any time talking about SAS Forecast Studio?
Not in this session.
What are the criteria to reconciliation? Are you going to divide the forecast between the number of by categories?
The default reconciliation strategy is proportional. There is also an option to split the difference equally.
Could I include an event column with customized events according to commercial activities of the business?
Yes, you could include an event as a column in the time series table. This would be part of your data prep. Adding many events can make the table very large. The event system creates a more compact event that does not require it to be included in the time series table.
How do you set up the data set for "Event repositories"?
There are a couple ways you can do that. You can obviously work directly in the UI to create the custom events. There are a couple options via code. One is you can use the PROC TSMODEL to create the event data set or add event. If you want to edit one of the nodes, you can just edit the node and add the statements for the event there. The other option is to use PROC HPFEVENTS, which is from our legacy product. SAS Forecast Studio. That will allow you to create an event table and then you can import that event table into the visual forecasting project.
Is this only in SAS Viya? If so, I would need to convince our company to allow us to purchase that software.
What I showed today was SAS Visual Forecasting. This is pretty much the only product that does everything that I showed today. There are things that can be done in other products, but on a smaller scale. You can do some basic forecasting in Visual Analytics, but it's one series at a time, whereas visual forecasting is designed to do thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of forecasts.
The SAS product we have is "Forecasting Studio". It is not the same as Visual Forecasting, which this webinar is about. We do program caseload time series/forecasting. Do you have tutor videos for that product?
There are some videos on YouTube and other reference material online that you can access. We have some other material we can share with you. There are also some virtual training classes that you can take. Please talk with your SAS account representative about your specific needs and also to determine if you have training credits. Let us know the specific areas within Forecast Studio that you are interested in learning more about.
How can I do these forecasting on the SAS Enterprise Guide?
The capabilities shown are not available in Enterprise Guide. Visual Forecasting is only available on Viya. Are you a SAS 9 or Viya user?
Great session Joe. Can you let us know whether the capability to use interactive modeling after the ensemble node to enable selection from any of the forecasting techniques compared, not just the top model is in the pipeline?
Thank you! I believe a feature request was opened for this on your behalf. We are discussing possible options and awaiting preliminary estimates around feasibility.
Recommended Resources
Interactive Events Management in SAS Visual Forecasting
Interactive Modeling in SAS® Visual Forecasting
Forecasting with the Distributed Open Source Code node
Enhance Forecasting Accuracy with Time-Series Segmentation and Machine Learning
Using Recurrent Neural Networks in SAS Visual Forecasting
Neural Network–Based Forecasting Strategies in SAS® Viya®
Forecasting with SAS®: Special Collection free ebook
Moving from SAS®9 to SAS® Viya®
Move to Viya Board
Please see additional resources in the attached slide deck.
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