You created a graph of Response over Time by Severity where Severity has three levels, "Severe", "Moderate' and "Mild". How do you ensure that "Severe" is always red in your graph, regardless of the data order? Normally, when creating any graph with a GROUP role, the distinct group values are assigned the style
In a previous article, I described how to use Windows PowerShell to connect to a remote SAS Workspace, run a SAS program, and retrieve the results. In that example, the only results I retrieved were the SAS log and SAS listing (text) output, if any. When you run a SAS
It is easy to use the SGPLOT procedure in SAS to plot the graph of a well-behaved continuous function: just create a data set of the (x,y) values on some domain and use the SERIES statement to connect the points. However, to plot the graph of a discontinuous function correctly
A frequent question we get from users is how to create a box plot with custom whiskers lengths. Some want to plot the 10th and 90th percentile, while other want the 5th and 95th percentiles. The VBOX statement in the SGPLOT procedure does not provide for custom whiskers. Also, unlike GTL,
SG procedures and GTL use a collision avoidance algorithm to position data labels for a scatter or series plot. This is enabled by default. The label is preferably placed at the top right corner of the marker. The label is moved to one of the eight locations around the marker to
A common request we have been often hearing is for display of the distribution of data as a box plot, along with some detailed information overlaid. For example, one may have ratings data of all the hospitals in a region by different specialty, and you want to view this distribution
A parametric bar chart in SG Procedure and GTL parlance is a simplified version of the regular bar chart, where the data is assumed to be summarized prior to its usage inside the SG procedures or GTL. So, multiple occurrences of the same category and / or group combination is
This week's SAS tip is from Ron Cody and his new book Cody's Collection of Popular SAS Programming Tasks and How to Tackle Them. If you're a SAS user and haven't explored Ron's work, you're missing out! Visit Ron's author page to view his extensive list of SAS books, user
SAS Code for your Valentine - just in case you forgot to get flowers, chocolate or other tokens of affection for the big day yesterday.
John D. Cook shared a picture of "pretty squiggles" on his blog, as well as a prose description of the mathematics behind it. I'm more of a programmer than a mathematician, but I've attempted to transcribe his description into a SAS program. I used DATA step to generate the point
Netflix has made a big splash in the news with its use of big data. By analyzing millions of data points about the viewing habits of its customers, the movie delivery giant used the insight it gained to devise the "perfect show". One of the defining characteristics of the show,
Recently a reader chimed in with a question on the Do Loop article by Rick Wicklin on how to create a bar chart with percent statistics. Rick used SAS 9.3 and the reader wanted to do the same with SAS 9.2. For the basic (non-grouped) bar chart, the process is the
In my previous article on Adverse Event Timeline Graph, I wrote about how to create the AE timeline using SAS 9.2 code, using VECTOR plot and the MARKERCHAR option in SCATTER plot. I described a better way to place the labels at the lower end of the vectors. SAS 9.3 provides an easier way
Often it is desirable to use special Unicode characters for the tick value names on the axes. However, SG procedures and GTL do not support Unicode strings in SAS data sets. With SAS 9.3, the SGPLOT procedure supports annotation which does support Unicode strings. You can create an annotation data set
A commonly requested graph is a bar chart with response and targets. With SAS 9.3, the SGPLOT procedure supports new "parametric" plot statements called HBARPARM and VBARPARM. These statements are special versions of the HBAR and VBAR statements and they expect summarized data for each category or category+group combination. Also,
A while ago I saw a blog post on how to simulate Bernoulli outcomes when the probability of generating a 1 (success) varies from observation to observation. I've done this often in SAS, both in the DATA step and in the SAS/IML language. For example, when simulating data that satisfied
When a categorical variable has dozens or hundreds of categories, it is often impractical and undesirable to create a bar chart that shows the counts for all categories. Two alternatives are popular: Display only the Top 10 or Top 20 categories. As I showed last week, to do this in
Sometimes a categorical variable has many levels, but you are only interested in displaying the levels that occur most frequently. For example, if you are interested in the number of times that a song was purchased on iTunes during the past week, you probably don't want a bar chart with
This first SAS tip of 2013 comes from the illustrious Ron Cody and his bestselling book Learning SAS by Example: A Programmer's Guide. I hope you'll find this excerpt helpful- as well as all of our future weekly tips on this blog. Here's to a great year! The following excerpt is from SAS Press
In my previous post, I described how to implement an iterated function system (IFS) in the SAS/IML language to draw fractals. I used the famous Barnsley fern example to illustrate the technique. At the end of the article I issued a challenge: can you construct an IFS whose fractal attractor
Fractals. If you grew up in the 1980s or '90s and were interested in math and computers, chances are you played with computer generation of fractals. Who knows how many hours of computer time was spent computing Mandelbrot sets and Julia sets to ever-increasing resolutions? When I was a kid,
Naomi Robbins has posted a contest, part 1 of which is to submit alternative representations for the following graph: Clearly, usage of two pie charts to represent the share of the B2B and B2C referrals will invite many responses. To create the graph, I took the data shown in the Pie Charts themselves, so we are using percent
In a recent article on efficient simulation from a truncated distribution, I wrote some SAS/IML code that used the LOC function to find and exclude observations that satisfy some criterion. Some readers came up with an alternative algorithm that uses the REMOVE function instead of subscripts. I remarked in a
A recent question by a user lead led me to experiment with what is often referred to as conditional highlighting. The user wanted to display a bar chart of response by year, where each bar is colored by year, and show a cross hatch pattern on the bars where the
Last week I attended my first SCSUG conference, this one in Houston. Houston, the fourth most populous city in USA, is the world's capitol of the Oil and Gas industry. So it was no surprise I met many attendees from local oil and gas related companies. But, I also met many
It's not too early to think about what presentations and pre-conference training to attend while at SAS Global Forum 2012. Tutorials are an extra-fee that is only available as additions to a conference registration. But you can get a deal: Registration package 3 includes your choice of one Sunday Pre-Conference Tutorial.
What's in a name? As Shakespeare's Juliet said, "That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet." A similar statement holds true for the names of colors in SAS: "Rose" by any other name would look as red! SAS enables you to specify a
Sometimes a graph is more interpretable if you assign specific colors to categories. For example, if you are graphing the number of Olympic medals won by various countries at the 2012 London Olympics, you might want to assign the colors gold, silver, and bronze to represent first-, second-, and third-place
The New York Times has an excellent staff that produces visually interesting graphics for the general public. However, because their graphs need to be understood by all Times readers, the staff sometimes creates a complicated infographic when a simpler statistical graph would show the data in a clearer manner. A
Last week I wrote a SAS/IML program that computes the odds of winning the game of craps. I noted that the program remains valid even if the dice are not fair. For convenience, here is a SAS/IML function that computes the probability of winning at craps, given the probability vector
