Many businesses operate within a certain geography or have a specific geographic relevance. For these businesses, visualising their business data on enhanced maps is of material importance in gaining valuable insights. And SAS Visual Analytics (VA) lets them do just that, even though it does not always offer the necessary geographic variables as a standard feature. That’s where custom polygons come in, allowing businesses to customise every map to their specific business needs.

In general, visualisation already works better than showing tabular data. And visualising your business data on top of a geographical map is yet another important step in rendering that data into valuable information from which to gain actionable business insights.

As we explained in another post, though, in order to obtain those precious insights, it is sometimes necessary to customise a map. And one way of doing that is by creating your very own custom polygons.

SAS offers specific functions to help you create those custom polygons, based on groups of existing polygons such as provinces, municipalities and other geographic variables that are readily available as standard features in Visual Analytics.

Let’s take a closer, more detailed look now at how you can use custom polygons to easily produce your own tailor-made reports in SAS VA.

First, of course, the custom polygons need to be created. There are always shape files you can find, retrieve or buy which contain standard polygon information about a nation’s geography, such as regions, provinces, municipalities and communes. Based on those polygons, you can now start to create your own custom polygons by grouping some of the aforementioned shape files together. In our example, we will use Belgium, our home country, as a nation. Some names of regions will be typically Belgian. A similar logic can be applied to other countries’ regions, though.

SAS has some specific geographical procedures that can be used for this. To start, we need to import the available shape files of the municipalities by using the PROC MAPIMPORT procedure. As a second step, we need to join these imported municipalities with the sectors we have defined ourselves based on grouping some municipalities together in one sector.

As a result, we now have the polygon information of each municipality in a sector linked to that sector itself. But to be able to use this properly, we need to redefine the outline of the polygon that groups all those municipalities together. This is achieved by using the PROC GREMOVE procedure of SAS.

The only thing remaining for us is now to join the information to the correct location. There are mainly two tables that need to be adapted to be able to use the polygon definitions in our VA reports. Both tables can be found in the VALIB folder in the SAS config folder:

To be able to use our custom polygons in SAS Visual Analytics reports, we need to make sure now that the two previously created tables (ATTRLOOKUP and CENTLOOKUP) are stored on the SAS VA server in the correct location. Then that server needs to be restarted to make sure that the polygons and their definitions are loaded properly into memory, so they are ready for use in the SAS VA reports.

When you have defined formats on the polygon IDs to show names instead of meaningless IDs, you also need to make sure that those formats are set in the table and that the formats catalog is also loaded to the VA platform. User-defined formats are not automatically loaded to SAS Visual Analytics. You need to put the catalog with the formats in the defined location on the SAS configuration of your VA platform. More details can be found here.

To use the custom polygons for your reports, you start by creating a new report and selecting a dataset that contains figures together with the IDs for the sectors you’ve defined.

When viewing the available columns of the selected dataset, you need to right-click on the sector ID and select geographical -> Custom polygon. Then you can select your created custom sector name from the list. When you now add a “Geo Region Map” to the report and drag your ID on it, together with a metric, it will show the polygons.

You can tweak your report by changing the colouring, transparency, contrast, etc. of the polygons based on the selected metric or standard.

This is an example of custom regions created from lower-level existing regions.

As you can see, it is not all that difficult to create your own professional SAS Visual Analytics report, using custom polygons with defined regions or sections. All in all, there are just three small steps to take:

Simply follow these steps and in no time you’ll be creating reports that are better adapted to the specific needs of your company and/or your clients.

In visual analytics, too, one size does not fit all. That is why SAS allows you to customise, among others, your geographical reports. And one way of doing that is by creating your very own custom polygons. A custom polygon, in simple layman’s terms, is a type of geographic variable supported by SAS Visual Analytics (SAS VA), along with custom coordinates and a number of predefined geographic variables.

Using predefined geographic variables, as listed here, you can easily visualise your business data to create, for instance, an insightful map of the countries, regions, provinces, etc. you are operating in. But what if your business is not organised according to these predefined variables? What if (part of) your sales organisation is specifically geared towards, say, South-West Flanders, the Kempen or the Rhine area? Then those custom polygons sure come in handy!

When creating maps in SAS VA, there are multiple object types to choose from:

Each of these object types requires a geographic variable, which is a variable with extra information attached to it. Sometimes longitude and latitude values serve as such, in other cases a polygon does. (You can find out more about geographic variables in this SAS blog about geo maps)

When we talk about custom polygons, we are referring to regions, sectors or other geographic variables that are not available as a standard feature or function in SAS Visual Analytics. Lots of businesses and industries in fact have their own specific map divisions, such as the regions in which their stores or agents operate, to give but one example. The polygons for these are not available for download. They are, however, very easy to build yourself. You really don’t have to be a techie at all to do so successfully.

First things first: to create your own custom polygons, you need a good point to start off from. Fortunately, there are always shape files you can find, retrieve or buy which contain standard polygon information about a nation’s geography, such as regions, provinces, municipalities and communes. Based on those polygons, you can now start to create your own custom polygons by grouping some of the aforementioned shape files together.

SAS has provided several functions you can use for this:

When finished, the new polygons need to be loaded into the system.

Suppose you have organised your activities based on a number of regions in Belgium that are specific to your business. The map on the left below presents you with a standard overview of your business activities in all Belgian municipalities. It probably won’t take you long to realise that it will be fairly hard, if not downright impossible, to gain actionable insights from the way those activities are represented here.

Now take a look at the map on the right. It contains the same information about your business activities from the same Belgian municipalities. Only now they are grouped by region: those regions, to be precise, that are specific to your business. A colour range, indicating high and low values, now clearly shows you – in the blink of an eye, so to speak – how your different regions are performing. Since the polygons used to achieve this are nowhere available, they had to be custom-made.

As this example of custom regions created from lower-level existing regions also shows, polygons can be used in hierarchies, allowing you to go from a lower level (e.g. Municipality) to a higher level (e.g. Region) – and vice versa. Very often custom polygons fit in some middle layer, where they will open up to the lower structures from which they were created.

In this particular use case we stayed within one country. Another benefit of deploying custom polygons is that it is easily possible to create regions while not looking at country borders.

Did we spark your interest in custom polygons? Great! In deploying them whenever required, your reports are guaranteed to be more adapted to the specific (business) needs of your company or client.