Predictive Capabilities of SAS Visual Analytics

[Shivi82]

Dear All,
We are in the process of finalizing a BI tool for our client. Currently in the process of compairing VA and Tableau.
As we are looking at more than just basic visulization which Tableau offers whereas VA has more depth.
However when i spoke with the Sales guy from my region he educated me on what all the tool could offer but i still have doubt.
Hence i would request the forum to please suggest to what extent we can perform text minining, correlations, clustering, regression with VA.

Kindly note that we are not looking at SAS Visual Statistics because that would only inflate our cost.

Regards.

[Kiwi_Colin]

"Hence i would request the forum to please suggest to what extent we can perform text minining, correlations, clustering, regression with VA"

You can do some text mining (using word cloud visualisation for simple word frequencies or more advanced sentiment analysis), can do correlations, but cannot do clustering and regression (this is in VS). However by starting with VA it gives you the possibility to add on VS in the future to easily migrate into more advanced analytics.

Fact sheet covers more details, including what other analytics VA can do: - http://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/en_us/doc/factsheet/sas-visual-analytics-105682.pdf

[MichelleHomes]

As a suggestion you may want to investigate the SAS Visual Analytics User Guide to see whether the depth of customization and calculation for your text minining, correlations, clustering, regression requirements can be met within SAS Visual Analytics. As you seemed to have recognised SAS Visual Statistics will have these capabilities at a richer/customized level so only you can determine based on your business requirements whether the SAS Visual Analytics capabilities will meet your needs. For some organizations I have worked with SAS Visual Analytics provides a high-level of analytic capability for their users and for other organizations it is an introductory level and they look to use SAS Visual Statistics or SAS Enterprise Miner.

I suggest to look through the SAS Visual Analytics User Guide and/or the "try before you buy" environment to clear any doubt you have.

Kind Regards,

Michelle

[Shivi82]

Thanks all for the suggestions. 

I went through and found a lot of meat and capabilities beyond BI offerings. However as we get 1 or 2 EG license along with the VA, no where in the documentation or elsewhere i could relate how would EG benefit me. EG is Enterprise Guide for understanding.

As EG in itself is a very powerful tool which lets you build good statistical models so any details on this would be great. 

Regards, Shivi

[MichelleHomes · Accepted solution]

Hi Shivi,

Yes Enterprise Guide is a powerful query and reporting tool that can also do statistical analysis depending on the underlying SAS licensed products your SAS server is licensed for. If you look at the documentation SAS Enterprise Guide has a rich set of point and click statistical modeling tools and a SAS programmer can also create the models in code. It depends on your SAS license though. If you are looking at statistical modeling then you'd want to have SAS/STAT licensed and potentially SAS/ETS and maybe other statistical products. Licensing these packages will enable you to use the point and click tasks and/or run the associated SAS procedures within Enterprise Guide.

Do you know what SAS products your SAS server is licensed for? Also what kind of models are you wanting to generate? Knowing what your requirements are will allow the community to provide more specific answers. In the meantime, you might find reading the SAS/STAT manual a useful introduction to understand the range of models that are available http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/statug/68162/HTML/default/viewer.htm#statug_intromod_sec...

Kind Regards,

Michelle