Overview of Projects

What Is a SAS Model Manager Project?

A SAS Model Manager project consists of the models, reports, documents, scoring tasks, and other resources that you use to determine a champion model. For example, a banking project might include models, data, and reports that are used to determine the champion model for a home equity scoring application. The home equity scoring application predicts whether a bank customer is an acceptable risk for granting a home equity loan.

Project work is organized in one or more time-based intervals that are called versions. Each version contains the documents, models, reports, resources, scoring tasks, and performance information for a time interval. Each version can have its own life cycle definition for tracking the progress of a project. For more information, see Working with Versions.

Project models can be imported from SAS Enterprise Miner or you can create your own models.

Multiple projects can be created within a project control group. Some project tasks cannot be performed for the projects that are within a project control group. For more information, see Overview of Project Control Groups.

How a Project Folder Is Organized

The SAS Model Manager project is a folder that contains versions, an optional Documents folder a Model Retrain folder, a Performance Monitor folder, a Publish Results folder, and the project input and output XML files. Here is the Project Tree view of a project:

Project Folder Contents in the Project Tree

In this Project Tree, the project name is HMEQ.

Here is a description of project folder components:

versions

are time-phased containers for your project. They contain life cycle information, candidate model files, model comparison reports, resource files, scoring tasks, and model performance reports. This Project Tree has two versions, 2012 and 2013.

Model Retrain

contains reports for models that have been retrained.

Performance Monitor

is used to execute the SAS code that creates the performance monitoring report data sets.

Publish Results

contains the results after publishing models to a database.

inputvar.xml

is an XML file that contains information about the project input variables and their attributes. This file is based on the project input variables that are defined when you create a project, modify a project, or declare a champion or challenger model.

outputvar.xml

is an XML file that contains information about the project output variables and their attributes. This file is based on the project output variables that are defined when you create a project, modify a project, or declare a champion or challenger model.

Documents

contain documents that are associated with the project. This folder is optional.

Note: Documents that were associated with a project in previous releases of SAS Model Manager and migrated to this release remain in the Project Tree as they originally were attached and not in the Documents folder.

Project Folder Tasks

When you right-click the project folder, SAS Model Manager provides the following project tasks:

New Version

creates a new time-phased version to contain life cycle information, candidate model files, model comparison reports, resource files, scoring tasks, and model performance reports. For more information, see Create a Version.

New Documents Folder

creates a new Documents folder to contain auxiliary documents, such as project notes and schedules. For more information, see Associate Documents with a Folder.

Lock Project Metadata

enables a SAS Model Manager administrator to lock the project metadata so that the project definition cannot be modified while it is locked. For more information, see Lock or Unlock Project Metadata.

Modify Project Definition

enables a user to modify the project properties and the project input and output table variables for the selected project. For more information, see Modify Project Definition.

Publish Models to a Database

transforms DATA step score code of a model to a scoring function or model scoring files, and writes them to the database. For more information, see Publishing Models to a Database.

Publish Models to a SAS Channel

publishes models to defined channels, and notifies subscribers of the publication channel when the models are delivered. For more information, see Publish a Model to a Channel.

Publish Models to the SAS Metadata Repository

publishes the champion model to the SAS Metadata Repository in order for the champion model to be run in a test or production scoring environment. For more information, see Publish Models to the SAS Metadata Repository.

Define Performance Task

starts a wizard that generates the SAS code to monitor the performance of a champion model or challenger model. For more information, see Overview of Creating Reports Using a Performance Task.

Dashboard Report Definition

starts a wizard to create performance indicators that are used to execute the dashboard reports. For more information, see Create a Dashboard Report Definition.

Define Model Retrain Task

starts a wizard that retrains one or more models. For more information, see Retraining Models.

Define Aggregated Report

specifies reports from the Reports folder that are used to create a single aggregated report. For more information, see Aggregated Reports.

Query

searches for models and tasks that are assigned to SAS Model Manager users. For more information, see Overview of the Query Utility.

Project Metadata

When you click on a project folder, the detail view on the right has tabs that categorize the project metadata:

The Properties tab shows the general metadata for the project. For more information, see Project Properties.
The Input Variables tab shows the project input variables and their attributes.
The Output Variables tab shows the output variables and their attributes.
The Publish History tab shows the models that have been published to a database, a SAS channel or to the SAS Metadata Repository. The metadata includes the published name, the destination, the method of publishing, the server name, the user ID that published the model, the date on which the model was published, the model function, whether the model is a champion model or a challenger model, the project name, the version name, the model name, and the model level.

Here are the project metadata tabs: