I was reading through Deloitte University Press' 2015 Holiday Spending survey - the results were interesting, but their graph made you jump through mental hoops to understand the data. So of course I used SAS to create a simpler version of the graph, so you'll have more time for holiday shopping!
Saturday Night Live has been on television for about as long as most of us have been old enough to stay up and watch it (since 1975). Therefore, when I saw that Rolling Stone had ranked all the cast members throughout the show's history, I knew this was going to
Can pattern recognition software tell us if it is a Hermit Thrush or a Swainson's Thrush we've seen? A few of us have been debating an identification question at work, because we agreed to help Fulbright Scholar and Duke University PhD student Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela with research she is doing related to bird collisions with windows. A sad
By now, you’ve probably seen a video of a 3D printer discharging layers of plastic to create a model of a building or a plastic figurine. You may have heard stories about 3D printed guns, 3D printed airplane parts and even 3D printed body parts. While 3D printers are becoming more common, they are
A coworker was recently in need of some simple graphics to include in a slide show to accompany her SAS Global Forum paper. After listening to what she wanted, I decided that I could use PROC SGPLOT to create those images for her. The first image was a set of stacked
The #1 rule of any self-respecting hipster is to not claim to be a hipster. Therefore, can there even be such a thing as a hipster beard, or hipster beard data? I contemplated this perplexing question, as I stroked my pirate beard. Since fashion trends tend to be cyclical, perhaps
When we first released GTL and SG Procedures back with SAS 9.2, Box Plots and Bar Charts would always treat the category axis as discrete. We realized soon enough that we need to support box plots on scaled interval axes for many clinical applications, and this was added in SAS
PharmaSUG 2015 in Orlando was held at the Renaissance had a record breaking attendance of over 650. Weather was great, except for a huge downpour on the evening of the last day. All the popular presenters were in attendance including Art Carpenter, Kirk Lafler, Arthur Li and many others. Presentations
North Carolina is a state that requires yearly inspections of motor vehicles. An inspection checks for safety features (lights, brakes, tires,....) as well as checking vehicle emissions to ensure that vehicles meet air pollution standards. I recently had a car inspected and noticed a pie chart on the inspection's summary
In recent releases of SAS, you can use Output Delivery System graphics or 'ODS graphics on' to produce nice graphical output for most of the analytic procedures. These default graphs are nice, but when you want your graphs to look "a certain way" SAS also lets you create your own custom graphs!
I was surprised to find that the size of the U.S. federal government is smaller today, than in the past many decades - let's graph it out, so it's easy to analyze... The way I got started on this little adventure was via Jishai's graph on dadaviz.com. Here's a snapshot
Sometimes different communities use the same name for different objects. To a soldier, "boots" are rugged, heavy, high-top foot coverings. To a soccer (football) player, "boots" are lightweight cleats. So it is with the term "waterfall plot." To researchers in the medical field, a "waterfall plot" is a sorted bar
I recently wrote about how to overlay multiple curves on a single graph by reshaping wide data (with many variables) into long data (with a grouping variable). The implementation used PROC TRANSPOSE, which is a procedure in Base SAS. When you program in the SAS/IML language, you might encounter data
North Carolina is one of those lucky states that has a huge variety of scenic destinations, such as mountains, piedmont, coastal plains, beaches, and 'outer banks' islands. We have state parks in all of these areas, but can you guess which state park has been trending the most during the past
Over the Christmas Holidays I saw an graph of agricultural exports to Russia in 2013. The part that caught my eye was the upper part of the graph, showing the breakdown of the trade with Russia as a horizontal stacked bar with custom labels. The value for each region / country
I published 118 blog posts in 2014. This article presents my most popular posts from 2014 and late 2013. 2014 will always be a special year for me because it was the year that the SAS University Edition was launched. The University Edition means that SAS/IML is available to all
The holidays are sometimes chaotic, especially for those tasked with analyzing consumer shopping data! I would like to share a few tips on adding order to your chaotic data. SAS recently published an interesting article, sharing the results from a consumer survey. The infographics in the article showed high-level summary information, such as:
My colleague Robert Allison has a knack for finding fascinating data. Last week he did it again by locating data about how blood types and Rh factors vary among countries. He produced a series of eight world maps, each showing the prevalence of a blood type (A+, A-, B+, B-,
There are two ways you can react to a “Hey – that was my idea” situation. The first would be to throw a pity party and lament about how unfair life is – if only the car hadn’t broken down and I didn’t have grass to mow and laundry to
Just this morning I received a request for a brief survey from Apple on my feedback about the new iPhone6+. Yes, I finally got one, dead last in the family. The survey followed the usual format, with a number of questions on what I like or dislike about it, with
The Mid-West SAS Users' Group conference in Chicago was a great success, with over 400 attendees and great weather. The conference hotel was in downtown with nice view of the river and a stroll down "Magnificent Mile". The city does a great job with the flower beds down Michigan Ave., along
Have you heard the old saying that "Banks only loan money to people who don't need it"? Let's analyze the data and see if that is true!... I'm very much a car-guy, and I love learning about all the new vehicles, and love the new-car feel ... and even the smell. It's hard to not like a
SAS 9.4 maintenance release M2 was released early in August. This release contains some exciting new features in GTL and SG Procedures. In this article, I will describe some of the new options added to the existing plot statements. Note, I will use the SG examples here, but these are
A few weeks back I wrote an article on Grouped Timeline for creating a stacked timeline for onset of different virus. The idea in that article was to display a stacked needle on a time axis using a HighLow plot. Such graphs are also referred to as EPI or Epidemic Curve
In this blog post, I put some classic rock song data under the SAS Analytics microscope, to see if I could get a better picture of exactly what is considered 'classic rock' these days... Michael Raithel recently pointed me to an interesting article/study about 'classic rock' music, and invited (or is
Last week I showed how to use the SUBMIT and ENDSUBMIT statements in the SAS/IML language to call the SGPLOT procedure to create ODS graphs of data that are in SAS/IML vectors and matrices. I also showed how to create a SAS/IML module that hides the details and enables you
Recently, a user posed a question on how to plot stacked frequencies on a time axis. The data included frequencies of different viruses by week. The data is modified to preserve confidentiality and is shown below. The user's first instinct was to use a bar chart with stacked groups. This works for automatically computing frequencies
When you hear of a Scatter Plot or a Series Plot, you have a picture in your mind what we are talking about. But one of the plot statements available in GTL, and soon with SGPLOT, is the BLOCK plot. I am sure this leaves many users scratching their heads, wondering
The GCHART procedure has a popular option called G100 to display all the subgroups in % format such that all the subgroup values add up to 100% for each group. Each subgroup is labeled with its own % values. SGPLOT procedure does not such an option, but with a little bit of
SAS is constantly evaluating new technologies for internal and customer experiences. Based on requests from many of our customers, SAS R&D engaged with Fusion-io® to do performance testing with Fusion-io® ION™ Accelerator and ioScale™ storage devices. Our testing goals for the testing included:
