Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Data Mining Tools: From SAS to R/Java

After a few months using SAS, I find it a powerful and interesting tool to use. It has its own programming language (SAS Base) which allows you to be very specific. On the other side, you have a strong GUI (Enterprise Guide) which lets you perform several tasks using drag and drop. One of the main issue with SAS is, of course, its price. Not every company can afford a SAS license.

sastojavar1

The question then is: when you have SAS code, how can you convert it to a free programming language such as Java or R? After some search on the web, I found the following solutions:

  • From SAS to Java: In the first look it seems difficult to compare SAS with Java code, since they are very different (Java is web oriented). However, it seems that DullesOpen has a tool, named Carolina, to convert SAS into Java code. You can test their tool online and I have contacted them to get a trial version. I will let you know when I have more information about this tool.
  • From SAS to R: SAS system and R language (the free version of S programming language) are quite close since they are both statistics oriented. Of course, the syntax is completely different. Up to know, I didn’t found any tool for automatic SAS to R code conversion. I will comment this post as soon as I will find some interesting tool.

Ajay from DecisionStats told me about MineQuest. It seems that they have a tool to convert SAS code to WPS (World Programming System), a SAS Base clone. If you have some suggestions or way of converting SAS to any other language, you’re welcome to comment this post.