SAS Viya: The R Perspective

Learn how to access analytics from SAS Cloud Analytic Services (CAS) using R and the SAS Viya platform.

SAS Viya: The R Perspective is a general-purpose introduction to using R with the SAS Viya platform. SAS Viya is a high-performance, fault-tolerant analytics architecture that can be deployed on both public and private cloud infrastructures. This book introduces an entirely new way of using SAS statistics from R, taking users step-by-step from installation and fundamentals to data exploration and modeling.

SAS Viya is made up of multiple components. The central piece of this ecosystem is SAS Cloud Analytic Services (CAS). CAS is the cloud-based server that all clients communicate with to run analytical methods. While SAS Viya can be used by various SAS applications, it also enables you to access analytic methods from SAS, R, Python, Lua, and Java, as well as through a REST interface using HTTP or HTTPS. The R client is used to drive the CAS component directly using commands and actions that are familiar to R programmers.

Key features of this book include:

• Connecting to CAS from R
• Loading, managing, and exploring CAS Data from R
• Executing CAS actions and processing the results
• Handling CAS action errors
• Modeling continuous and categorical data

This book is intended for R users who want to access SAS analytics as well as SAS users who are interested in trying R. Familiarity with R would be helpful before using this book although knowledge of CAS is not required. However, you will need to have a CAS server set up and running to execute the examples in this book.

About the Authors

Yue Qi, PhD, is a staff scientist at SAS. He works on automated and adaptive machine learning pipelines, deep learning models on unstructured data, interactive data visualization, and open-source language integration. He has extensive experience in applying these technologies to develop analytics products, build successful models on big data for customers, and help customers solve their most challenging business problems, especially in the finance industry.

Kevin D. Smith has been a software developer at SAS since 1997. He began his career in the development of PROC TEMPLATE and other underlying ODS technologies, including authoring two books on the subjects. He is now heavily involved in client-side work on the SAS Viya platform. This includes development of the R, Python, and Lua SWAT packages, as well as higher-level packages built on top of the foundation created by SWAT.

Xiangxiang Meng, PhD, is a Senior Product Manager at SAS. The current focus of his work is on SAS Visual Statistics, deep learning, reinforcement learning, the Python interface to SAS Viya, and other new product initiatives. Previously, Xiangxiang worked on SAS LASR Analytic Server, SAS In-Memory Statistics for Hadoop, SAS Recommendation Systems, and SAS Enterprise Miner. His research interests include deep learning and reinforcement learning, automated and cognitive pipelines for business intelligence and machine learning, and parallelization of machine learning algorithms on distributed data. Xiangxiang received his PhD and MS from the University of Cincinnati.