Tips and Tricks For Better Forecasting With SAS® Q&A, Slides, and On-Demand Recording

[#1]

Watch this Ask the Expert session to learn importance of data preparation prior to forecasting.

Watch the webinar

You will learn:

• How to perform feature engineering for time series forecasting.
• SAS programming techniques for time series forecasting-related data preparation.
• The difference in data preparation when applying time series versus machine learning methods.
• How to automatically perform data manipulation tasks in SAS Visual Forecasting UI.

A related ask-the-expert session on the topic "An A to Z Overview of Forecasting in SAS®" by the same authors is available here.

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

Currently our team utilizes SAS FS and EG - would I be able to: input a . in place of 0 - for 24 months of historical time stamped data?

If I understand this question correctly, the answer is yes. You could either do this, for example, by using proc timeseries or coding approach, or there are also options in forecast server itself which allows you to do so programmatically or in the UI where you can handle aggregations and define what should happen with missing values.

Additionally, is it possible to run a program in SAS EG adding the promotional variable to previous time stamped data and scheduling a job to import the change in FS?

The answer is yes this is possible. It would be a 2-step approach. First step is data management, where you have a job which adds this promotional variable to your input data. This would be the first thing and then immediately after this you have to update your forecast in your project. I understand from your question that you're asking for forecast server. Forecast server offers you the forecast server batch macros. For example, the “update project” macro will allow you to do so.

Is there a way to do Time Series forecasting in SAS Forecast Studio?

The answer is yes, because our Forecast Studio is the front end for time series forecasting in SAS 9. I just want to add to this that the forecast studio is based on the previous developments of SAS platform, while today we showcased SAS Viya and SAS Visual Forecasting. Of course, this doesn't mean that you can't do some things that we showcased today in SAS 9 as well, but you'll see a lot of limitation for machine learning, deep learning, and more advanced techniques, as well as things like the segmentation that we showed which is not available in SAS 9 and Forecast Studio.

Is 'SAS/ETS' or a SAS Econometrics license a plug-in or part of a program like SAS EG?

Enterprise guide itself is just a user front end, which helps you to access the SAS server. If you have Enterprise Guide, you don't have automatically all the modules available which SAS offers. You have to check your SAS license whether it includes SAS ETS or SAS Econometrics or SAS Visual Forecasting. This is a prerequisite for example to have e.g., PROC EXPAND. You can use “PROC SETINIT” in SAS EG or SAS Studio to see the programs that you’ve licensed.

Recommended Resources

Replace Missing Values in Time Series Data Using PROC EXPAND and PROC TIMESERIES

Using the TIMESERIES procedure to check the continuity of your timeseries data

Have a look at your TIMESERIES data from a bird's-eye view - Profile their missing value structure

3 ways to consider movable holidays in SAS

5 things you should know about SAS Visual Forecasting

Using SAS Viya for Time Series Data Handling

Forecasting with SAS free ebook

Moving from SAS®9 to SAS® Viya®

Please see additional resources in the attached slide deck.

Want more tips? Be sure to subscribe to the Ask the Expert board to receive follow up Q&A, slides and recordings from other SAS Ask the Expert webinars.