SAS Enterprise Miner vs. TensorFlow

SAS Enterprise Miner is world-class software for individuals interested in developing reproducible models in a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps the most useful part of SAS Enterprise Miner is the ability to compare models with other models without writing code. The ensemble modeling capabilities is the easiest way to do ensemble modeling I have come across. SAS Enterprise Miner is well-suited for beginning to advanced analysts who know something about advanced analytics. The software is not well-suited for analysts or companies that have little interest in advanced modeling.

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TensorFlow is great for most deep learning purposes. This is especially true in two domains: 1. Computer vision: image classification, object detection and image generation via generative adversarial networks 2. Natural language processing: text classification and generation. The good community support often means that a lot of off-the-shelf models can be used to prove a concept or test an idea quickly. That, and Google's promotion of Colab means that ideas can be shared quite freely. Training, visualizing and debugging models is very easy in TensorFlow, compared to other platforms (especially the good old Caffe days). In terms of productionizing, it's a bit of a mixed bag. In our case, most of our feature building is performed via Apache Spark. This means having to convert Parquet (columnar optimized) files to a TensorFlow friendly format i.e., protobufs. The lack of good JVM bindings mean that our projects end up being a mix of Python and Scala. This makes it hard to reuse some of the tooling and support we wrote in Scala. This is where MXNet shines better (though its Scala API could do with more work).

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• Enterprise Miner is really visual and lets you do a whole lot without actually going into the detailed options. For decent results, you should really explore the different advanced options though.
• The recent versions of Miner allow users to use R code in Miner. You can then compare several models and approach to get the best performing model.
• The resulting data is really well displayed and easy to understand (ex: the lift graph, score ranking, etc.)
• Miner has the ability to integrate custom SAS code which allows the user to add functionalities that are specific to the project.

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• A vast library of functions for all kinds of tasks - Text, Images, Tabular, Video etc.
• Amazing community helps developers obtain knowledge faster and get unblocked in this active development space.
• Integration of high-level libraries like Keras and Estimators make it really simple for a beginner to get started with neural network based models.

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• SAS is not as user friendly as other stats software.

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• RNNs are still a bit lacking, compared to Theano.
• Cannot handle sequence inputs
• Theano is perhaps a bit faster and eats up less memory than TensorFlow on a given GPU, perhaps due to element-wise ops. Tensorflow wins for multi-GPU and “compilation” time.

Support of multiple components and ease of development.

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SAS' customer support used to be non-existent many years ago. Today, contacting SAS customer support is great. They are responsible, knowledgable, and seem to have an interest in getting the results right the first time. With that said, Enterprise Miner's online support is weak, probably because the user base is much smaller than other tools.

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Community support for TensorFlow is great. There's a huge community that truly loves the platform and there are many examples of development in TensorFlow. Often, when a new good technique is published, there will be a TensorFlow implementation not long after. This makes it quick to ally the latest techniques from academia straight to production-grade systems. Tooling around TensorFlow is also good. TensorBoard has been such a useful tool, I can't imagine how hard it would be to debug a deep neural network gone wrong without TensorBoard.

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Use of cloud for better execution power is recommended.

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SAS EM has a very great set of machine learning and predictive analytics toolsets, which helped our organization achieve its goals. We used other tools, but for us, SAS EM was the most intuitive and easy to learn the tool and it provides greater data exploration and data preparation capabilities compared to the other tools we used.

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Keras is built on top of TensorFlow, but it is much simpler to use and more Python style friendly, so if you don't want to focus on too many details or control and not focus on some advanced features, Keras is one of the best options, but as far as if you want to dig into more, for sure TensorFlow is the right choice

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• In our organization, users were using SAS already so the learning curve was really low. Within a few weeks after the implementation, the users were already delivering models developed with SAS Enterprise Miner. It is difficult to talk about ROI as models were already being developed before. It was mostly a change of technology and it was a smooth transition.
• Going with Enterprise Miner came with migration from desktop use of SAS to a server use of SAS. This created a new role of SAS administrator. This was obviously a cost but as the use of SAS increased greatly, it was expected.
• From a methodology standpoint, Enterprise Miner helped greatly in the documentation of the model development which was a requirement in a few groups such as the risk groups. Having a visual "GUI-like" approach to development, the flowchart or diagram of the project in Miner was able to give users a good understanding of the approach the analyst took to develop the model.

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• Learning is s bit difficult takes lot of time.
• Developing or implementing the whole neural network is time consuming with this, as you have to write everything.
• Once you have learned this, it make your job very easy of getting the good result.

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