Last Updated on April 16, 2022
SAS Institute Inc. (“SAS”) is an American multinational developer of analytics software based in Cary, North Carolina. The company has around 14,000 employees.
SAS started as a project at North Carolina State University to create a statistical analysis system used mainly by agricultural departments at universities in the late 1960s.
SAS is the name of their software suite that can mine, alter, manage and retrieve data from a variety of sources and perform statistical analysis on it. It has more than 200 components covering areas including statistical analysis, econometrics and time series analysis, an interactive matrix language, data mining and much more.
SAS/INSIGHT software, a component of the SAS System, is a tool for data exploration and analysis. Explore data through graphs and analyses linked across multiple windows. It analyzes univariate distributions, investigate multivariate distributions, and fits explanatory models using analysis of variance, regression, and the generalized linear model.
SAS is proprietary software. What are the best free and open source alternatives to SAS/INSIGHT?
1. RapidMiner
RapidMiner (formerly known as YALE) is a flexible Java environment for knowledge discovery in databases, machine learning, and data mining. It allows experiments to be made up of a large number of arbitrarily nestable operators, described in XML files which are created with RapidMiner’s graphical user interface.
It features an easy-to-use visual environment, a plugin mechanism, and high-dimensional plotting, as well as an extension mechanism that makes it possible to integrate new operators and adapt the system to your personal requirements. The modular operator concept of RapidMiner allows the design of complex nested operator chains for a huge number of learning problems in a very fast and efficient way (rapid prototyping).
There are three editions of RapidMiner available. Only the free edition is licensed under an open source license. And it’s limited to 10,000 rows and 1 logical processor.
2. Orange
Orange is a component-based framework for machine learning and data mining. It includes a range of data visualization, exploration, preprocessing and modeling techniques. It can be used through an attractive graphical user interface or alternatively as a module for Python programming language.
For explorative data analysis, it provides a visual programming framework with emphasis on interactions and creative combinations of visual components.
3. KNIME
KNIME is a coherent and comprehensive open source visual platform for data integration, processing, analysis, reporting and exploration.
It enables users to visually create data flows (often referred to as pipelines), selectively execute some or all analysis steps, and later investigate the results through interactive views on data and models.
All articles in this series:
| Alternatives to SAS's Products | |
|---|---|
| Base SAS is a fourth-generation programming language (4GL) for data access, data transformation, analysis and reporting. It is included with the SAS Platform. |
 | JMP (pronounced “jump”) is a suite of computer programs for statistical analysis. JMP software combines interactive visualization with powerful statistics. |
| SAS Enterprise BI Server provides a solid basis for vendor consolidation and BI standardization, enabling IT to focus on more effectively aligning with the business. |
| SAS Enterprise Miner aims to streamline the data mining process. It helps you analyze complex data, discover patterns and build models so you can more easily detect fraud, anticipate resource demands and minimize customer attrition. |
| SAS/ETS provides SAS procedures for econometric analysis, time series analysis, time series forecasting, systems modeling and simulation, time series data management, and more. |
| SAS/GRAPH is a data visualization tool that lets you create effective, attention-grabbing graphs. It consists of a collection of procedures that let you provide a variety of charts, plots, 3-D scatter/surface plots, and more. |
| SAS/IML is a powerful, flexible matrix programming language for interactive and exploratory data analysis. |
| SAS/INSIGHT is a tool for data exploration and analysis. Explore data through graphs and analyses linked across multiple windows. |
| SAS/STAT provides tools and procedures for statistical modeling of data. It includes analysis of variance, linear regression, predictive modeling, statistical visualization techniques and a lot more. |