155-2008: Cool New Features in SAS® Enterprise MinerTM 5.3

SAS released Enterprise Miner 5.3 in late 2007 with a veritable plethora of cool new features for data miners everywhere. Nearly every module of the software has been updated. New interactive data preparation tools make it easier to manipulate data and construct a sample for mining. For data exploration, Enterprise Miner now supports hierarchical market baskets to isolate interesting rules at different product category levels, multivariate graphical data exploration that persists a user’s interactive selections, a new scalable variable clustering node for dimension reduction, and more interactive user control over feature selection. Variable creation has been enhanced with a new interactive binning tool, an interactive rule building tool, and new transformation options. There are three new core predictive modeling techniques in Gradient Boosting, Support Vector Machines, and Partial Least Squares, along with a tool to make it easier to import models previously produced with SAS/STAT code. For model assessment, a new Cutoff node examines posterior probability distributions where users can enter cutoff values, and a new Reporter tool uses SAS ODS to produce reports spanning the entire analysis for printing and editing. The user interface is revised with more navigation controls, smarter property sheets, better graphics, and improved code editors. Users should see significant productivity gains from the software, and have even more fun data mining. INTRODUCTION SAS Enterprise Miner has been an industry-leading tool in the data mining field for nearly 10 years. This might lead you to believe that data mining products are in maintenance mode; however, that is most definitely not the case. On the contrary, the field of data mining is rapidly evolving to include new transactional and Web-based data sources; new applications such as social network analysis, rate making, and time series classification; and new modeling algorithms to detect global and local features. The latest release of Enterprise Miner contains a host of new productivity, statistical, interactive, and graphical tools designed to improve the productivity of the SAS data miner. This paper will focus on the new features in Enterprise Miner 5.3 with analytical examples. MIGRATION Before we can start data mining, we have to consider platforms and migration. Enterprise Miner 5.3 runs on SAS 9.1.3 Service Pack 4. Installation requires updates to the SAS Foundation, the SAS Analytics Platform, and the SAS Enterprise Miner client. Those users who need to preserve their Enterprise Miner 4.3 projects will find a new project conversion utility that moves all Enterprise Miner 4.3 diagrams into an Enterprise Miner 5.3 project. This function preserves the diagram structure, many of the node properties, and many of the tools results such as log and output listings, source and score code, and results tables needed for producing gains charts. The Enterprise Miner 4.3 result sets are visible inside the Enterprise Miner 5.3 Node Results window so that users can then run the diagrams in Enterprise Miner 5.3 and compare output. This will satisfy users’ needs to archive and retrieve their Enterprise Miner 4.3 results from within Enterprise Miner 5.3. Users of Enterprise Miner 5.2 will not need to perform any migration action because these projects are directly usable in Enterprise Miner 5.3. NEW FEATURES The Enterprise Miner 5.3 documentation and product literature provide a detailed list of new and enhanced features. That list is too lengthy to discuss in detail in this paper. Instead, we will focus on a few key features that will affect users in the areas of usability, graphical exploration, feature selection, variable binning, group processing and model building, and post processing. Data Mining and Predictive Modeling SAS Global Forum 2008