Captain Obvious and SAS Enterprise Miner

Maybe this is obvious, but I have often found that what is obvious to some people is not so obvious to others, so here are a few random tips.

1. Enterprise Miner can take a REALLY long time to load during which you wonder if anything is happening at all.

Open up the task manager and look for something that says javaw.exe *32  You can see it near the bottom in the image above. The number next to it should be going up, from 30,000 to 50, 000 etc. If it is, you should probably be patient for a few more minutes and your session will start.

2. Let’s say you want to change the properties of something. For example, I don’t want the data set to be partitioned into Training, Validation and Test in a 40, 30, 30 split. I want it to be 50, 50, 0.  So, I right-click on the DATA PARTITION node, get a drop-down menu and

there is all of this stuff about Edit Variables all the way down to Disconnect Nodes, where the hell are the properties to change? They’re on the left, in that window with the title Property!  Funny, but it’s so easy to focus on the diagram window and completely forget about everything else. Click on a node and it’s properties will show up in the window.

3. While the three screens you see when you run the StatExplore node are pretty interesting, it would be nice to have a more detailed look at your data. Just go to the VIEW menu and you can get more statistics, like the cell chi-square values, descriptive statistics of numeric variables broken down by the levels of your target variable.

Now that you are starting to see some of what you can do with Enterprise Miner, you’ll be wondering what MORE you can do, like decision trees, for example. I’m glad you asked that question ….