SAS Raises Bar on Data Mining and Text Mining

SAS’ award-winning data mining and text mining softwarejust got better.

SAS Enterprise Miner 5.2 and SAS Text Miner 2.3 are shipping this fall with enhancements that will make it easier to uncover insights quickly from information contained in structured data as well as unstructured data in large document collections.

Technical and business users alike will benefit from enhancements including:

• Easy-to-use graphical reports.
• Streamlined data mart creation.
• Support for Web mining, Web crawling and blog analysis.

"SAS Enterprise Minerand SAS Text Minerare worth their weight in gold," says Dr. Patricia Cerrito of the University of Louisville. "They’ve paid for themselves many times over by highlighting cost and quality issues, leading to valuable improvements in healthcare at Louisville hospitals and worldwide."

How it works
SAS’ collaborative environment allows users to capitalize on data gathered from a greater number of channels: text, Web paths and time series-related transactions. The software then creates unified predictive models that automatically extract the critical information from all of these diverse data sources.

Using the tightly integrated SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform, the mining results can then be plugged into the SAS ETL Serverand SAS Enterprise BI Serveror other existing data integration or BI reporting systems. More than ever before, SAS makes it easy to deliver valuable business information to users through their preferred channels.

SAS Enterprise Miner 5.2 and SAS Text Miner 2.3 provide new statistical and visualization options for uncovering trends and patterns. For example, new interactive graphics enable business analysts to quickly uncover complex relationships. Users can explore mining results using flexible navigation options that search the data for trends and anomalies to gain insights and fresh ideas. New multi-user grid-computing support reduces the time needed to both build and deploy accurate predictive models.

Enhanced SAS Enterprise Miner
Interactive, exploratory data analysis and modification features enable users to easily uncover data quality issues. Features include:

• Interactive plots that identify outliers and specify valid ranges both for interval and categorical variables.
• An interactive expression builder that allows users to incorporate unique custom business rules, including interactions between factors – even complex ones with math representations involving higher-order polynomial terms.
• Interactive specification that identifies replacement options for missing or miscoded values, both for input and target categorical variables.
• Customized profit-and-loss decision matrices that are integrated into the scoring process to support finer resolutions of decision definitions.

Enhanced Web mining rapidly identifies the most significant Web path sequences to track the navigational patterns of Web site visitors. By including Web traffic behavior, time series transactions and market basket contents into the modeling process, data miners can build richer prediction models that capture and highlight complex customer behaviors.

SAS Text Miner expands data mining capabilities
In this enhancement, a new macro automatically creates synonym lists from misspellings, including transposed, inserted and deleted letters, acronyms and embedded punctuation. A new browser window for terms readily expands synonyms. The Singular Value Decomposition, a proven dimension reduction technique, processes "like terms" together. SAS automates the once tedious set-up process by removing the requirement to manually enter industry specific vocabulary.

Text parsing now spans eight languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. This flexibility enables a global organization to gain a 360-degree view of its entire customer base. Language-based parsing is now combined with interactive drill-down and visualization of concept linking. In this version, any word can be treated as a concept. At the click of a mouse, concepts can be expanded to show associated relationships. This capability, combined with an integrated taxonomy browser, helps deliver deeper insights.

Documents can be analyzed in PDF, HTML or any of a dozen other formats. SAS Text Miner can analyze text from call center notes, comments gathered in surveys, Internet information like blogs, and it can perform Web crawling to better support research needs.

With these enhancements, SAS users now have more control to make dynamic adjustments that enhance their mining efficiency. No other data and text mining solution is able to deliver this kind of customization tailored to specific data. From the automated data mart preparation to the distributed multi-system grid allocation, the entire process is easy and scalable.