Enabling Powerful Analytics with JMP® Scripting for SAS® and R Users
Matthew Flynn, PhD, Director, Claim Research – The Travelers Companies Inc.
Analytics are viewed as increasingly important for competitiveness in the Property and Casualty (P&C) insurance marketplace. Researchers in insurance utilize the depth of SAS Analytics and data integration daily. Adding JMP to the toolkit enhances the researcher’s intuition and communication of analytic results by allowing easy visualization of SAS data with JMP. Scripting in JMP also facilitates the rapid development of tools that allows one to “share well with others” – that is, to enable your business users to access power analytic tools. This paper will highlight new features in JMP 9 that utilize JMP integration with SAS and R, aiding the solution of business problems in P&C research analytics. JMP has always provided a number of ways to interact with operating systems, for instance, connecting to local and remote SAS servers, executing SAS code and exchanging data programmatically. In this paper, we will explore multiple methods that we have found useful in our analytic work for interacting with the statistical package R from within JMP via JMP Scripting Language. Example methods include batch file-based communication, Windows OLE/COM communications, socket communications, and using the Load Dll functionality to call R functions. I will also highlight the power of utilizing the new JMP 9 functionality for accessing R and show examples of adding to the functionality of JMP by accessing the Microsoft Windows API via the JMP LoadDll function. Examples include accessing Windows environmental variables; controlling and positioning JMP windows; defining hot-keys; importing and exporting data to Microsoft Excel; and GUI automation testing via sending keystrokes.