I wrote 114 posts for The DO Loop blog in 2015. Which were the most popular with readers? In general, highly technical articles appeal to only a small group of readers, whereas less technical articles appeal to a larger audience. Consequently, many of my popular articles were related to data
An interesting question came up recently, where a colleague wanted to create a bar line chart with Revenue on the Y axis and Profit on the Y2 axis. The Revenues were all positive, but the Profit had positive and negative values. Some data I generated is shown on the right. Creating this
Beim adventlichen Weihnachtsstern Basteln am vierten Advent hob ich schon warnend den Finger und hielt Sie gemäß des Mottos „Save a Tree“ dazu an, beim Ausdruck der Schnittmuster mit dem Papier ressourcenschonend umzugehen. Vor dem Hintergrund der in Paris erfolgreich verhandelten Begrenzungen des zukünftigen CO2-Ausstoßes, muss man sich ja auch noch
A Box Plot is very popular to view the distribution of an analysis variable with one or more classifiers. Also, everyone wants to customize the graph in different ways. One recent request was for creating a box plot by category and group along with the display of various statistics and overlaid
Liebe Kollegen und Kunden, ich verfolge diesen Blog schon seit Anfang Dezember, aber nun muss ich mich auch mal zu Worte melden: In den letzten Tagen wurden die Weihnachtswichtel ja regelrecht ausgebeutet, dass es mir die Schamröte ins Gesicht trieb. Schneider-, Schuster-, Maler-, Druckerwichtel mussten täglich ihre Effizienz steigern, immer
さて、今回ご紹介する例は、最近議論が活発な、「機械（コンピューター）が人間の作業を奪う（？）」お話です。 機械は人間から仕事（今回の例では、仕事ではなく娯楽と言ったほうが近いかもしれません）を奪ったことになるのでしょうか？それとも、真の楽しみを味わえるように、単に単純労働から開放してくれただけなのでしょうか？ 昨今、人工知能がもたらす変化という文脈で行われている議論ですが、今回は、昔からある最適化アルゴリズムで、人間の仕事を奪います。皆さんでその意味を考えてみてください。 イギリスの諜報機関GCHQがクリスマスメッセージとして送った難解なパズルが公開されており、優秀な人たちを楽しませています。その第一問が、以下の「お絵かきロジック」です。日本でも一時期流行しました。イラストロジックなどとも言われ、私自身もトライした記憶があります。 このパズルそのものについては、他の情報源に頼って欲しいのですが、簡単に説明すると、それぞれのセルを黒か白で塗りつぶすパズルで、行と列に書かれている数字は、黒マスが連続している数を順番どおりに示している「手がかり」です。いくつかのセルはすでに黒く塗りつぶされていますが、それらはこのパズルの答えを一つに確定するために必要です。 一部の箇所は、それぞれの行や列の情報だけを見て解くことが可能です。例えば、７番目の行を見てみましょう。手がかりは、(7 1 1 1 1 1 7)です。すなわち、全部で 7 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 7 = 19 個の黒いセルが必要となり、最低ひとマスは間隔が空いていないといけないので、7個の固まりの間の個数を考慮すると、7-1=6 個の白マスが必要となります。この二つの数字を足すと、19 + 6 = 25 となり一行の列数とおなじ数にちょうどなります。したがって、この結果から直ちにこの行の全てがあきらかになります。 黒7, 白1, 黒1, 白1, ・・・ ついてきていますよね。 しかし、そうは簡単にいかない箇所のほうが多いでしょう。その場合には、手がかりから部分的にしか黒く塗りつぶせないことになります。例えば、一行目を見てください。ヒントから(7 + 3 + 1 + 1 + 7) + (5
Lo how a rose e'er blooming From tender stem hath sprung As I write this blog post, a radio station is playing Chrismas music. One of my favorite Christmas songs is the old German hymn that many of us know as "Lo, How a Rose E're Blooming." I was humming
The British spy agency GCHQ recently posted a grid-shading puzzle that the director sent out in his Christmas cards this year. The puzzle, shown here, is known as a nonogram and by various other names, including Paint by Numbers and FigurePic: Each cell is to be colored black or white,
Recently Sanjay Matange blogged about how to color the bars of a histogram according to a gradient color ramp. Using the fact that bar charts and histograms look similar, he showed how to use PROC SGPLOT in SAS to plot a bar chart in which each bar is colored according
In the previous article I described a way to create a box plot with multiple connect lines using SAS 9.40M1 or later release . I created the graph using SGPLOT with VBOX and overlaid SERIES statements. Such an overlay of a basic plot on the VBOX statement is supported starting
This blog post is motivated by a post by a user on the communities page about creating a box plot with colored boxes by category and multiple connect lines. Normally, a box plot can be drawn by category, with a single connect line for one of the statistical values of
Recently a user posted a query on the SAS Communities page asking on how to create a histogram where the bins of the histogram are colored by the analysis variable using a three color ramp. Essentially, he wanted the bins to be colored from "Low" to "High" along the horizontal
When creating a statistical graphic such as a line plot or a scatter plot, it is sometimes important to preserve the aspect ratio of the data. For example, if the ranges of the X and Y variables are equal, it can be useful to display the data in a square
The ODS statement controls most aspects of how SAS creates your output results. You use it to specify the destination type (HTML, PDF, RTF, EXCEL or something else), as well as the details of those destinations: file paths, appearance styles, graphics behaviors, and more. The most common use pattern is
Sometimes you are writing a program that needs to find out whether a particular SAS product (like SAS/ETS, SAS/QC, or SAS/OR) is licensed. I was reminded of this fact when I wrote last week's blog post about how to create a map with PROC SGPLOT. Although the SGPLOT procedure is
If your graphics look a little on the fuzzy or blurry side, there are lots of ways to increase the resolution of your SAS graphics output. Let’s go over some of these methods. Before increasing the resolution of your graphics output, check to see what you are creating your graphics
I have written a new book on advanced ODS Graphics examples. It is available as a free PDF file on the web. It is in color, and all of the SAS code is available by double clicking a link at the beginning of each example. Advanced ODS Graphics Examples Update:
In many procedures, the ID statement is used to identify observations by specifying an identifying variable, such as a name or a patient ID. In many regression procedures, you can specify multiple ID variables, and all variables are copied into output data sets that contain observation-wise statistics such as predicted
How much does this big pumpkin weigh? One of the cafeterias at SAS invited patrons to post their guesses on an internal social network at SAS. There was no prize for the correct guess; it was just a fun Halloween-week activity. I recognized this as an opportunity to apply the
Statistical programmers often need to evaluate complicated expressions that contain square roots, logarithms, and other functions whose domain is restricted. Similarly, you might need to evaluate a rational expression in which the denominator of the expression can be zero. In these cases, it is important to avoid evaluating a function
Early last year I wrote an article on how to create the "Most Frequent Adverse Events Sorted by Relative Risk" graph using the SGPLOT procedure. The key issue here is that such a graph normally displays two plots side by side, a scatter plot of the proportion values by treatment
All axis customization features are always welcome. Especially since SGPLOT statements can often be used to create non standard graphs, having the ability to customize the axes is important. This article presents ways in which you can customize the discrete axes. By default, the x axis will try to display the
Rick Wicklin created a nice example of using the SURFACEPLOTPARM statement to create a surface plot in SAS. As I read it, the question that immediately came to mind was: can I use this to create the famous SAS cowboy hat? The "cowboy hat" is a highly distributed example of
Update 02Dec2016: Beginning with SAS 9.4 Maintenance 4, there is now a JSON libname engine. Read this new article to learn more -- you might prefer it to using DS2 for this task! Thanks to the proliferation of cloud services and REST-based APIs, SAS users have been making use of
Often there is a need to display more than one response simultaneously for a bar chart, series plot or a vector plot. SAS 9.40M3 adds the options you need to get such results using two new options COLORRESPONSE and THICKRESPONSE where applicable. The Bar Chart on the right shows the frequency
The SGPLOT procedure provides great tools to create all kinds of graphs for all domains from business to clinical. However, every so often, we need to create visuals that are not exactly graphs, but more like flow or network diagrams, or something entirely unique. Some users may have tools to
A friend who teaches courses about statistical regression asked me how to create a graph in SAS that illustrates an important concept: the conditional distribution of the response variable. The basic idea is to draw a scatter plot with a regression line, then overlay several probability distributions along the line,
I think everyone can agree that being able to debug programs is an important skill for SAS programmers. That’s why Susan Slaughter and I devoted a whole chapter to it in The Little SAS® Book. I don’t know about you, but I think figuring out what’s wrong with my program
Often when the data includes some extreme difference in measures or some outliers, the plot of the data points can get skewed due to the need to accommodate the extreme outliers. The bulk of the observations get squeezed into a smaller region of the plot. While this may be useful
A few weeks back I saw a couple of posts on the Communities page from users wanting to find ways to compute the area of an general polygon and also the center of the area. I felt such features likely existed somewhere in the SAS/GRAPH set of procedures, so I asked our resident
