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Data Mining Using SAS Enterprise Miner Randall Matignon, Piedmont, CA

An Overview of SAS Enterprise Miner The following article is in regards to Enterprise Miner v.4.3 that is available in SAS v9.1.3. Enterprise Miner an awesome product that SAS first introduced in version 8. It consists of a variety of analytical tools to support data mining analysis. Data mining is an analytical tool that is used to solving critical business decisions by analyzing large amounts of data in order to discover relationships and unknown patterns in the data. The Enterprise Miner data mining SEMMA methodology is specifically designed to handling enormous data sets in preparation to subsequent data analysis. In SAS Enterprise Miner, the SEMMA acronym stands for Sampling, Exploring, Modifying, Modeling, and Assessing large amounts of data.

The reason that SAS Enterprise Miner has been given this acronym is that usually the first step in data mining is to sample the data in order to acquire a representative sample of the data. The next step is to usually explore the distribution or the range of values of each variable to the selected data set. This might be followed by modifying the data set by replacing missing values or transforming the data in order to achieve normality in the data since many of the various analytical tools depend on the variables having a normal distribution. The reason is because many of the nodes in Enterprise Miner calculate the square distances between the variables that are selected to the analysis. The next step might be to model the data. In other words, there might be interest in predicting certain variables in the data. The final steps might be to determine which models are best by assessing the accuracy between the different models that have been created.

The Ease of Use to Enterprise Miner SAS Enterprise Miner is a powerful new module introduced in version 8. But, more importantly SAS Enterprise Miner is very easy application to learn and very easy to use. SAS Enterprise Miner is visual programming with a GUI interface. The power of the SAS Enterprise Miner product is that you do not even need to know SAS programming and have very little statistical expertise in the development of your Enterprise Miner project since it is as simple as selecting icons or nodes from the EM tool palette or menu bar and dragging the icons onto the EM diagram workspace or desktop. Yet, an expert statistician can adjust and fine-tune the default settings and run the SEMMA process flow diagram to their own personal specifications. The nodes are then connected to one another in a graphical diagram workspace. SAS Enterprise Miner is visual programming with SAS icons within a graphical EM diagram workspace. It is as simple as dragging and dropping icons onto the EM diagram graphical workspace. The SAS Enterprise Miner diagram workspace environment looks similar to the desktop in Windows 95, 98, XP, and Vista. Enterprise Miner is very easy to use and can save a tremendous amount of time having to program in SAS. However, SAS Enterprise Miner has a powerful SAS Code node that brings in the capability of SAS programming into the SEMMA data mining process through the use of a SAS data step in accessing a wide range of the powerful SAS procedures into the SAS Enterprise Miner process flow diagram. Enterprise Miner produces a wide variety of statistics from descriptive, univariate, and goodness-of-fit statistics, numerous types of charts and plots, traditional regression modeling, decision tree analysis, principal component analysis, cluster analysis, association analysis, link analysis, along with automatically generated graphs that can be directed to the SAS output window.

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