Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review If you have an analytics department, Data Science is perfect for making analyses quicker. Data Science works well for web querying, automating analyses, sharing advanced analyses with others, and performing lots of other advanced analytical processes. Data Science is not a good fit if the analytics you do is stuff that Excel can do. The software is powerful, with lots of features, and unless you actually plan on using those features, it's not worth paying for.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review It has a great user interface, easy to navigate and learn on the fly. There are lots of great options for data organization and analysis! Makes it a handy tool for presentations as well. A collaborative ability is highly valued for my company where we often work from home or on site. Being able to share the data with those in the office so multiple people can look at it is a great tool! Read full review Cons With large data sets, SAS Enterprise Miner sometimes takes a long time to run. Sometimes you have to just leave your computer running while Enterprise Miner does its thing. If you want complete control over the modeling framework, you have to take what Enterprise Miner does and customize it. SAS seems to be working hard on making things easier to customize, but it's not completely there yet. The graphic capabilities of SAS Enterprise Miner leave a lot to be desired, especially in the era of self-service business intelligence software. Read full review Unfortunately, some functionality is hidden per upgrade to other versions. Feel data mining functionality would be useful, but not budget for software. At the current price point, would have expected more (such as Mathematica breadth of functionality for one price). It is light on optimization capability. Slow when considering very large datasets, performing things such as distribution identification Steve Wagner Director, Network Design and Logistics Analytics
Read full review Likelihood to Renew The company is hesitant to spend this much on software. They are primarily an engineering firm, and they don't understand the use of analytical software for environmental professionals.
Read full review Support Rating I have contacted SAS twice in the past year and they have been super responsive both times. They solved my problem. I am also registered for an in-person class next month and they called today to tell me that it will be an online-only session. They apologized for the change and registered me for the online version. Super helpful!
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review I prefer Spotfire Data Science's approach. It is more natural and fits the way I think. I prefer to use Spotfire Data Science's VB for writing macros. It is real code, meaning that I do not need to trick the software to do what I need and there are no implied loops over solving simple problems. The graphs are publication quality and can be edited by hand or using a macro if I am building hundreds of them. Spotfire Data Science had a user-friendly approach to building lengthy data processing streams (in its workspaces). It is just so fast for analyzing a dataset that you have never seen before and efficient for ongoing work on the same data.
Read full review Return on Investment SAS Enterprise Miner is a positive ROI in the sense that it saves a ton of time coding. SAS Enterprise Miner is a negative ROI in that it's expensive, and perhaps makes analysts brainless. Read full review Our company has had the program for less than 1 year. We don't expected a positive return this year. The goal is for Data Science to led to defined projects by the end of the end of the year and implementation in the following two. Overall, we are planning on 4 years to fully recoup the cost of the software and the cost of implementing identified projects. Read full review ScreenShots Spotfire Data Science Screenshots