It's not a problem to collect volumes of data. Much more difficult, then, it is to analyze those rows, find patterns, relationships, and - after all - make appropriate conclusions. A lot cannot be seen "at face value", most dependencies become visible after a long and complicated analysis which rarely might be done by human. That's why SAS with its Predictive Analytics and Data Mining and other vendors with their own solutions support Business Intelligence with advanced tools for analysis and data mining. Loftily speaking, these solutions' goal is to allow business users to learn future from the past.

In a very few words, SAS aims at three aspects: exploratory data analysis, model development and deployment, and scoring acceleration. These three components together make the Predictive Analytics and Data Mining solution that ensures quite a wide set of analytic capabilities. The suite, then, can be supplied with text mining tool that works more or less similar to data mining, but covers the already omitted area.

SAS Enterprise Miner

SAS Enterprise Miner is company's main solution for data mining. Its fundamental is to simplify the data mining process with quite a wide set of analytic capabilities to help business users with predictive analysis that lead to making better and more efficient decisions. Working on a very large amounts of data, SAS Enterprise Miner searches for patterns, partnerships, specific relations or trends that - otherwise - would have been omitted. Business users can therefore know the risk better and prepare themselves for it. Moreover, they can realize he trends earlier and - then - react properly when it's most payable (in case of positive trends) or before it's too late (in case of negative trends).

SAS Enterprise Miner key features

• Includes a wide set of differentiated tools that support all data mining appliances. Thank o them, no special nor advanced IT knowledge is needed to turn rows of data into easily understandable and clear models. Predictive analysis can also be done by people from even the most differentiated departments - easily and quickly.
• Provides versatile data mining workbench that facilitates building more efficient models.
• Is easy to use for all users, regardless actually of their knowledge, skills, and experience. The SAS Rapid Predictive Modeler tool automates plenty of tasks, thereupon there are only few things users still need to take care about on their own. Followed with integration with MS Office Excel, fully customizable way of output visualizing makes SAP Enterprise Miner a tool even for the very beginners.
• Helps increasing the quality of decisions. With significantly improved predictions accuracy and shorter time needed for output spread, SAS Enterprise Miner becomes responsible for quite an important part of company management.
• Automates scoring and simplifies deployment processes. There is a complete scoring code (SAS, C, JAVA, and PMML) implemented and - simultaneously - it is easy to modify it.
• Is operated from within an intuitive and - what also important - interactive interface.
• Provides a wide set of capabilities for data preparation, summarization, and - then - summarization (outlier filtering, data partitioning, transformations, data replacements, so on and so forth).
• Offers a wide set of analytic and modeling options (clustering, path analysis, reduction techniques, decision trees, gradient boosting, two stage modeling, boosting, etc.).
• Lets users be the only to decide how their models are going to look. Main solution and a set of additional tools are enough for almost all data mining appliances, regardless what stage of management they are provided on.
• Supports model comparing and reporting. Every output can be quickly and easily verified and compared to other results.
• Is open for different extension so that SAP Enterprise Miner can be even more efficient and profitable. It's not a problem to customize the solution to make it suit the company requirements best.
• Is prepared for working for a single user or for the whole company equally well. The solution is very well scalable and - therefore - plays its role within even the largest organizations with the highest requirements.

SAS Data Mining resources

• http://www.sas.com/resources/brochure/predictive-analytics-suite-overview.pdf - an interesting introduction to predictive analytics and data mining solutions provided by SAS. There is a short story about each and every component of the suite, easily understandable and full of useful but general information. Truly a good source for the beginning with SAS solutions.
• http://www.sas.com/technologies/analytics/datamining/miner/index.html#section=1 - the official SAS website provides all needed information about SAS Enterprise Miner solution for data mining. There are facts divided into a few sections - general overview being also an introduction to the system and data mining as a whole, benefits - divided into four categories and explained, features listed in sections, very useful demos to view and screenshots, and - separately - technical requirements. Moreover, here is where one can get to all data sheets from (listed on the right side of the website). In short, it's a good source of separate information - for the ones who want to discover how SAS Enterprise Miner looks as a whole it could be difficult there. Much better for the ones who know the whole, and - from any cause - need the details.
• http://www.sas.com/resources/factsheet/sas-enterprise-miner-factsheet.pdf - that's not an accident they call it a fact sheet. Here's a total twelve page introduction to SAS Enterprise Miner release 6.2. Features, benefits, overview, system requirements, so on and so forth - just everything one should know about the Enterprise Miner before deciding which data mining solution to choose. Even though the fact sheet lacks for details in fact, it's very good and - unlike many other "official" brochures - reliable source of knowledge.
• SAS Data Mining - Using Sas Enterprise Miner Case Study.pdf - a long book for cold winter evenings. "Data Mining Using SAS Enterprise Miner: A Case Study Approach" is a great selection of different cases, chosen and well described on over a hundred of pages of the book. Quite a good source of knowledge for Business Intelligence specialists or for the ones who - at least - know the fundamentals of today's BI and data mining.
• http://www.sasenterpriseminer.com/data_mining_links.htm - unlike many other websites that provide more or less credible information about the SAS solutions, this one is nothing more than just a collection of - more or less - useful links to other websites containing material about SAS Enterprise Miner. There are official websites, private sites, and blogs included - each and every with a few words of description what one could find there. All in all, that's quite an interesting source of unsorted information - one can find a lot of useful facts thank to this website, however - equally well - he might find nothing if he's looking for something concrete.