This is the 2nd installment of the "Getting Started" series, and the audience is the user who is new to the SG Procedures. It is quite possible that an experienced users may also find some useful nuggets here. One of the most popular and useful graph types is the Bar
A SAS customer asked how to use background colors and a dashed line to emphasize the forecast region for a graph that shows a time series model. The task requires the following steps: Use the ATTRPRIORITY=NONE option on the ODS GRAPHICS statement to make sure that the current ODS style
A Spider Plot is another way of presenting the Change from Baseline for tumors for each subject in a study by week. The plot can be classified by response and stage. Another way of displaying Tumor Response data was discussed earlier in the article on Swimmer Plot. This article is prompted
Last week I had the pleasure of presenting my paper "Graphs are Easy with SAS 9.4" at the Boston SAS Users Group meeting. The turn out was large and over 75% of the audience appeared to be using SAS 9.4 back home. This was good as my paper was focused on the cool new
In this post, I will show you how to control the order of the entries in a legend and explicitly control the correspondence between groups and style elements in PROC SGPLOT. In many cases, the colors that are used to differentiate groups do not matter--the graph simply needs to display
In a scatter plot, the regions where observations are packed tightly are areas of high density. A contour plot or heat map of a bivariate kernel density estimate (KDE) is one way to visualize regions of high density. A SAS customer asked whether it is possible to use SAS to
One of my favorite new features in PROC SGPLOT in SAS 9.4m2 is addition of the COLORRESPONSE= and COLORMODEL= options to the SCATTER statement. By using these options, it is easy to color markers in a scatter plot so that the colors indicate the values of a continuous third variable.
As often is the case, this article is prompted by a recent post on the SAS/GRAPH and ODS Graphics page communities page. A user wanted to create a Graph Table showing a bar chart with tabular data for each of the category values along the x-axis. The user was creatively using
Last week I posted an article on displaying polar graph using SAS. When the measured data (R, Theta) are in the polar coordinates as radius and angle, then this data can be easily transformed into the XY space using the simple transform shown below. x=r*cos(theta * PI / 180); y=r*sin(theta * PI
At the 2013 SAS Global Forum, I presented a paper titled "Make a Good Graph" which reviewed some of the features that make for a good graph. This paper presents an aggregation of ideas from various sources, including some recommendations from thought leaders in the graphics arena such as Edward Tufte,
The advent of the AXISTABLE statement with SAS 9.4, has made it considerably easier to create graphs that include statistics aligned with x-axis values (Survival Plot) or with the y-axis (Forest Plot). This statement was specifically designed to address such needs, and includes the options needed to control the text attributes of
Let us continue our review of the Clinical Graphs included in the CTSPedia repository. Today, I noticed this Heatmap of Benefits and Risks over Time for Subjects in a study by Treatment, submitted by Max Cherny using "R" code. I thought it would be a good exercise to see how to build this
A few weeks ago I posted an article describing how to display simple Network Diagrams with Curved Links using SGPLOT procedure. The key requirement is that the node positions have to be computed by user. Often, for simple diagrams, nodes can be positioned using a simple layered layout. Separately, I also
The SG procedures in SAS use aesthetically pleasing default colors, shapes, and styles, but sometimes it is necessary to override the default attributes. The MARKERATTRS= option enables you to override the default colors, symbols, and sizes of markers in scatter plots and other graphs. Similarly, the LINEATTRS= option enables you
Let us continue with our journey beyond standard plots and charts. Often we need to create some simple diagrams to visualize the connections between different entities such as patients and providers or even a social network. Many of you may not have a custom tool to create diagrams. But you have Base SAS, so
Last week I posted an article on creating Infographics using SAS. The interest shown by the SAS community in this topic came as a surprise. Also, it so happened by coincidence, a SAS users also called into Tech Support just about the same time with a query about creating Infographics type graph
Last week Sanjay Matange wrote about a new SAS 9.4m3 option that enables you to show all categories in a graph legend, even when the data do not contain all the categories. Sanjay's example was a chart that showed medical conditions classified according to the scale "Mild," "Moderate," and "Severe."
Infographics are all the rage today. Open any magazine or newspaper and we see data and numbers everywhere. Often, such information is displayed by adding some graphical information to add context to the data. A couple of good examples are Communicating numeric information, and Facts about Hot Dogs. Riley Benson, our UX
A customer wants to use PROC REG to fit a simple regression model but display in the fit plot markers that differentiate groups of individuals. Click on a graph to enlarge. Before we see how to do that, let's look at some simpler examples. The following step fits a linear
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
Did you know that you can use the POLYGON statement in PROC SGPLOT to draw a map? The graph at the left shows the 48 contiguous states of the US, overlaid with markers that indicate the locations of major cities. The plot was created by using the POLYGON statement, which
Many users of ODS Graphics will be excited to learn that, beginning with SAS® 9.4 TS1M3, SG procedures are able to recognize formatted values that contain Unicode values. One benefit of this is that it allows you to include, without using annotation, special symbols such as greater-than-or-equal-to signs or Greek
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
We all want to customize our graphs just so, and have our personal preferences. Over the past few releases SG Procedures and GTL have added options to customize the look and feel of our graphs. In this article, I will describe new ways in which you can customize your legends. We will also see some
When ODS Graphics was first released with SAS 9.2 in 2008, a conscious effort was made to create graphs that were consistent and aesthetically pleasing out of the box. Features in the graph derive their visual attributes from the active Style. When Group classifications are in effect, the different classification
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
A very common type of graph contains two series plot, where the user is expected to evaluate the difference visually. I saw one such plot on the web today shown on the right. This graph has two curves, one for malpractice premiums and one for claims, with a shaded band
In clinical trials, a waterfall plot is often used to indicate how patients in the study responded to treatment. In oncology trials, the response variable might be the percent change in the size of a tumor from the individual's baseline value at the start of the trial. The percent change
Back in late 2012 I discussed a technique for Conditional Highlighting, where additional attributes can be displayed in a graph. In the previous article the goal was to display a graph of Response by Year by Drug. We used a cluster grouped bar chart to create the bar chart. We
The xkcd comic often makes me think and laugh. The comic features physics, math, and statistics among its topics. Many years ago, the comic showed a "binary heart": a grid of binary (0/1) numbers with the certain numbers colored red so that they formed a heart. Some years later, I
