“Smart Features” in SAP Analytics Cloud – 2017 Review

Thanks to the community of driven professionals ready to positively impact businesses, predictive features in SAP Analytics Cloud reached new heights in 2017. Surpassing a variety of milestones across our portfolio allowed the refinement of key features and release of newfound capabilities to create the Smart Assist portfolio.

Highlighting the latest resources, let’s take a look at the year in review:

Time Series Forecasting

Provide business users with more freedom in projecting future outcomes. Our forecasting algorithms allow users to gain more control over the modeling techniques used.

• Blog: The release of Triple Exponential Smoothing enhances time series forecasting capabilities
  Explore the three modeling techniques in a time-series chart to understand trends, fluctuations and seasonality. Making precise data-driven decisions utilizes historical data to predict the future with time series forecasting.

• Video Tutorial: Time series forecasting for planning data
  The future can be planned with confidence using the time series forecasting feature. Project possible future outcomes with a click of a button.

• Blog: Uncovering time series forecasts run on live connections
  Find out what happens to your data when a forecast is run on a live connection and answers to common questions raised towards the use of live connection in combination with the time series forecasting feature.

Time Series Forecasting

R-Visualizations

Enhance your SAP Analytics Cloud story by visualizing with no limits. The enhancements of interactive R-Visualizations leverage machine learning and statistical capabilities to strengthen data analysis. In simplifying the use of R, no configurations are needed when using the R server runtime environment provided by SAP. This option comes with a list of preinstalled packages to easily tap into interactive visualizations. Alternatively, you can set up your own R server.

• Video Tutorial: Discover the capabilities of R-Visualizations to guide your analysis
  Leverage the countless options to illustrate data by adding R-Visualizations to a story. This video guides through the process of adding a sales manager network using R scripts.
• Blog: Visually represent your data in a word cloud through R-Visualizations
  Dive into the techniques of using R-Visualizations to highlight textual data. Quickly gain insights by showing higher frequency words in larger, bolder font.

Smart Assist Portfolio

Our Smart Assist Portfolio consists of the following four features:

1. Smart Discovery

Explore and simulate hidden relationships and structures. Smart Discovery uncovers all the influencers that affect how strategies will execute.

• Blog: Smart Discovery enables business users to interact with insights through intuitive charts and natural language
  Understand the main business drivers behind core KPIs. Explore hidden structures and relationships in your data with classification and regression techniques.
• Blog: How to optimize your fitness activity using Smart Discovery
  Whether reaching the goals of a business or a personal fitness goal, understanding the factors to guide users toward the right direction will drive immediate success. Surface hidden patterns in fitness activity by understanding the key influencers affecting one’s health.

Smart Discovery

2. Smart Grouping

Adding more data visualization capabilities in the hands of business users was a focus in 2017. With a significant addition to the Smart Assist feature set, seamlessly segment data and tailor your business decisions to those groups.

• Video Tutorial: Automatically cluster data with Smart Grouping
  Explore related data points with the flexibility in defining the attributes to be considered. Smart Grouping allows users to instantly visualize clusters of data on scatter plots and bubble charts.

3. Smart Insights

• Video Tutorial: Use Smart Discovery and Smart Insights in a story

4. Smart Data Wrangling

• Blog: Get Better Insights by Data Wrangling the Smart Way

What Will 2018 Bring?

With the countless successes of 2017, the excitement continues onward! We look forward to 2018 as we take on topics such as natural language processing, predictive modeling, an enhanced Smart Discovery experience and much more.

Happy Predicting!

This post originally appeared on the SAP community page and has been republished with permission.