SAS Visual Investigator: It's Not JUST for Fraud
SAS Visual Investigator is a highly flexible SAS platform product for intelligence analytics and full-service investigation and incident management.
For example, you can use it to:
- Expose money laundering networks.
- Enforce regulatory compliance.
- Solve law enforcement cases.
- Defend against disease outbreaks in hospitals and assisted living facilities
- Find missing children and reunite them with their loved ones.
- Conduct legal discovery
- Track down and put a stop to insurance fraud and other fraud schemes.
Think anything that requires investigation or intelligence gathering.
Detect. Investigate. Analyze. Solve.
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Overview
SAS Visual Investigator enables you to identify, investigate and govern the end-to-end life cycle of an investigation, search or inquiry. It helps you every step of the way by giving you the ability to:
- Explore: Explore and prepare data
- Detect: Search and discover clues and insights that trigger alerts
- Investigate and analyze: Investigate alerts
- Decide: Disposition alerts
- Act
Step 1. Explore and prepare data
The first step to an investigation is assembling, exploring and preparing your data. Two of the countless cool things that SAS Visual Investigator brings to the table are entity resolution and fuzzy matching.
Step 2. Detect: Search & discover to detect patterns, relationships, outliers, and anything suspicious or germane
- Free-text searches
- Fuzzy searching
- Geospatial searches
- Proximity searches
- Field boosting (relevancy optimization)
You can also:
- Refine search results using interactive filters and facets
- Search across all data (internal and external sources)
- Conduct a form search, i.e., search within a specific form field, such as surname for an individual or VIN number to find a specific vehicle
- Restrict searches to specific entity types, fields, comments or insights
Step 3. Analyze & investigate
SAS Visual Investigator enables you to:
- Filter and visualize search results in different ways to aid investigations entities, resolve entities and relationships, and initiate actions such as adding results to investigation workspaces for further analysis
- For targeted investigations, easily capture views of your dynamic workspace and search visualizations (e.g., maps, timelines, grids and networks), as well as notes and images documented by the analyst
- Preview and refine details of search results interactively
- Use selection tools to highlight and collate objects for further investigation
With SAS Visual Investigator, analysts and investigators can rapidly investigate and disposition alerts and events. Or! You can eliminate information lags by automating aspects of the investigation using AI embedded within SAS Visual Investigator! You decide where human eyes are required.
Some examples of ways that AI can be built into your investigation with SAS Visual Investigator are:
- Administrators can author scenarios to automatically generate alerts for analyst review using:
- Rule builder
- Decision table
- SAS code
- Alerts may be based on:
- Advanced analytic models
- Business rules
- Integration with third-party systems
- Scores can be based on one or multiple scenarios
- Testing scenarios and scorecards is easy
You can:
- Customize scenarios that contain the logic to detect and report unusual activity, connections
- Filter and visualize search results in different ways to resolve entities and relationships
- Initiate actions such as adding results to investigation workspaces for further analysis
- Use selection tools to highlight and collate objects for further investigation
Step 4. Solve: Decide and Act
Alerts can trigger actions such as:
- Further analysis
- Interview subject
- Make arrest
- Add to do not fly list
- et cetera
The alerts and event management capabilities enable you to:
- Prioritize and assign alerts
- Visualize alerts in different views to gain context
- Enhance alerts by adding entities and integrating and connecting data
- Escalate by routing alerts or changing their priorities
- Set up auto-disposition options
- Designate an alert to prompt a deeper investigation
End User Interface “Investigate and Search Data”
Gone are the days of giant bulletin boards that you have to come to the office to see.
Now have everything searchable and drillable and sharable at your fingertips from any location. AND! You can easily capture views of your dynamic digital workspace.
Here is an example of the home page, i.e., the landing page the user/analyst/investigator sees when signing in to SAS Visual Investigator.
But remember, the home page as well as all aspects of SAS Visual Investigator are completely customizable!
Here is are example of the Alerts page:
Example Timeline:
Example Networks.
Example map search.
Summary
Hopefully I have piqued your interest in SAS Visual Investigators. To learn more, see the resources listed below and keep an eye out for my next post Authoring Scenarios in SAS Visual Investigator. Scenarios hold the logic for triggering alerts and actions.
For More Information
- SAS Visual Investigator courses:
- SAS Visual Investigator: Your Window into SAS by Susan Trueman and Seb Charrott (12 min, 2022)
- Keeping Children Safe from Neglect and Abuse with SAS Visual Investigator by Steve Bennett (6 min, 2...
- SAS Visual Investigator how to videos
- Users
- What’s New in 10.3 (7 min)
- Performing an Advanced Search (8 min)
- Introducing Search Capabilities (2 min)
- Geospatial Search Capabilities (2 min)
- Using Searches, Workspaces and Insights (2.5 min)
- Exploring the Alert Triage Process (3 min)
- Exporting to Microsoft Excel (2 min)
- Admins
- What’s New in 10.3 for Administrators (11 min)
- Managing Groups, Users and Capabilities (4 min)
- Functionality and Performance (4 min)
- Users
- SAS Mobile Investigator overview of capabilities; YouTube by Sebastian Charrott (9 min) “A Day in th...
- SAS Law Enforcement Intelligence – Evidence Creation
Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here.
