Can't attend SAS Global Forum to take advantage of all the great content? Be sure to tune in to watch select live and on-demand sessions from the event. See technology demos, presentations and interviews featuring conference leaders, presenters and the SAS staff posted on this SGF Support Portal. In addition, you can find all the keynote speakers and sessions by viewing the Visual Analytics SGF agenda. What SGF content would you like to see featured on the Visual Analytics community? Would you like to see the content featured as a discussion, article, or community topic? Enjoy! Anna-Marie ... View more

The NCAA Tournament and its "March Madness" are now upon us - but before the games begin there is this stress for many teams about whether they will make the final four. Using Big Data concepts and SAS Visual analytics, we were able to create a predictive model in SAS Visual Analytics. To complete this task, we opted to use a SAS VA Geo Map. Have you used a Geo Map in VA yet? It’s easy to create one! We created the charts below by taking these few simple steps: 1. We made a SAS data set containing the names of all the teams in the final four since 1979. 2. We then added US state abbreviations for each team to the list to create the geo map. 3. We dragged over both final four team names and the state codes to the workspace in VA to create the attached graphs. Also, we took other basketball data into account. Here are some other helpful (and some not-so-helpful) factors for selection. Here’s what’s been successful in the past: •    RPI (Rating Percentage Index), based upon wins, losses, and strength of schedule •    Jeff Sagarin rankings from USA Today •    Wins against top 25 teams (per RPI rankings) •    Wins against teams ranked 26-50 •    Neutral court wins (Note: conference tournaments matter!) •    Record and rank in-conference (regular season championships matter!) •    Strength of conference (conferences do matter!) Based on the historical data and the current basketball factors/trends, this is our final four prediction: Duke, Carolina, Kansas, and Kentucky. Now it’s your turn! Let's submit a community bracket to prove that SAS has the best modelers around! Please submit your entries to this thread during the tournament. Entries can be submitted prior to the start of the NCAA tournament or during the tournament. Having a hard time viewing the charts on your browser? Please see the attached .pdfs for an example. Thanks! Most Common Final Four Teams States Represented by the Final Four: ... View more

We thought we would give the community members another chance to answer a use case scenario thread. After we receive a few responses, we will post the answer that was provided by our internal product experts so that you can see how the various responses compared. This week we are sharing best practices on Data Management Studio to speed up processing of large data sets. We want to know what your approach would be? Scenario: “What are the best practices for splitting up work that involves performing address verification on a large number of records? Specifically, what is the best way to split up the job processing and shorten the overall execution time of the job? Alternatively are there some DMSERVER settings I can change? What are the techniques / recommended best practice for doing this?" As a community member, what would be your solution? ... View more