In March 2017 we released SAS Visual Forecasting 8.1, built for Viya, and introduced an open platform – a forecasting ecosystem. SAS Visual Forecasting was designed to be highly scalable, making one pass through the data to do multiple analyses.
Then in December, we upped the game with the release of SAS Visual Forecasting 8.2.
The biggest news of this new release is that SAS Visual Forecasting now has a user interface. The interface facilitates a process workflow approach where you can organize and structure your forecasting process.
Within your workflow you can explore and prepare data, and utilize SAS supplied or custom forecast models that you have created. The interface allows you to compare and visualize forecast results, and make overrides to the statistical forecasts.
Also new, SAS Visual Forecasting 8.2 adds an extremely flexible capability for making manual overrides to the statistical forecast generated by your models. Instead of being limited to overrides within the forecasting project hierarchy, you can now make overrides based on attributes – such as a product’s color, or customer sentiment from an analysis of online reviews.
At the core of SAS Visual Forecasting is the TSMODEL procedure. TSMODEL innovatively requires just one read of the data to do multiple analyses. Its scripting language is optimized and compiled based on the machine it is running on, and the scripts are distributed to the available hardware.
In 8.2, two packages are added to the TSMODEL procedure.
- The SSA package supports Singular Spectrum Analysis, a powerful tool for detecting patterns in long time series with few model assumptions. Spectral groupings can then be individually analyzed using time series techniques.
- The MOTIF package supports Motif Analysis, for the discovery and detection of motifs in time series data.
The new TSINFO procedure handles date variables in the input data, and can automatically determine the suitability of time ID variables in an input data set.
And finally, SAS Visual Forecasting 8.2 lets you run both SAS/ETS procedures and the SAS Forecast Server Procedures (in addition to its Viya procedures) through SAS Studio.
For more information, see the SAS Visual Forecasting product page and documentation.
