Two questions about SAS Viya

[TorNeilands]

Dear SAS Viya Team,

My congratulations to you all on creating a very smooth and useful user-interface. I just logged in to the trial Viya account and have navigated around in it, run some of the sample programs, looked at the outputs from those programs, and looked at some of the documentation for the Viya procedures. I have two initial questions:

1. Are there any plans to make the smoothed weight of evidence (SWOE) available in PROC BINNING? I ask because I learned the SAS Advanced Preditive Modeling course taught by Jeff Thompson that a simulation conducted by SAS Institute showed the SWOE to perform the best across a wide variety of conditions. The SWOE formulae appear on p. 4-18 of the course documentation and the simulation findings are described on pp. 4-10 through 4-11.

2. Will Viya support project-building via flow diagrams in line with the way SAS Enterprise Miner is used? I use SAS/Base and SAS/Stat for most of my work and was pleased to see one can still write SAS code and SAS programs and execute those within the Viya environment. I am guessing folks who use Enterprise Miner might be more used to working with a visual flow diagram, however. Perhaps I missed a way to access building code through flow diagrams in the Viya preview?

With best wishes,

Tor Neilands

UCSF

[paulkaefer · Accepted solution]

I saw this thread because it's still unanswered... I know there are SAS employees who respond to questions here, but another great place to post these would be the SASware ballot. If your ideas aren't in the works, this can bring them to the attention of developers.

[BrettWujek]

Hi Tor - Thanks for continuing to play around with SAS Viya.  Your feedback is invaluable in helping us continue to enhance it for what users really need/want.

On your specific items here:

1) SWOE: Until your request here, this was not in our plans.  But since you brought it up, we went ahead and took a closer look at what Jeff presented in that course and it seems to be provided by some macros composed especially for that course.  We are starting to look at the feasibility of rolling that code into the production proc.  No promises yet because we are just starting to look and see where the work might fit, but thanks for bringing it up.

2) Flow diagrams: The first release (and the associated early preview version) focused on ensuring we had a good foundation of the analytics in place for programming and for applications to make use of.  But rest assured, we have been working on the design for an analytics pipeline application in SAS Viya for quite a while, and much of the plumbing for managing this is in place.  It's coming!

Thanks again for the great feedback.  Keep it coming!

Brett

[TorNeilands]

Dear Brett,

Thank you for your kind and thorough responses to my questions and suggestions. And thank you for considering the SWOE possibility. As for the flow diagramming capability, I am glad to know this is also being considered. If it is implemented, I would have one other request, which is when it is implemented, if control-Z for "undo" could be included, that would be extremely helpful. At the risk of reliving an embarassing episode as a novice Enterprise Miner user in Jeff's class, I managed to inadvertently delete my entire EM flow diagram and was dismayed to discover that I couldn't get it back with control-Z. Jeff went truly above and beyond and kindly rebuilt it for me from scratch during one of the class breaks. If undo functionality could be built into the eventual flow diagramming capability of Viya, that would be a boon for novices like me in enabling us to reverse silly deletion mistakes. 

Much appreciated and thanks again for you and your colleagues' hard work on this very exciting, powerful, and user-friendly product! I am eager to get it at our site. 🙂