Feature du jour
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
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
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
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
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
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
SAS 9.4 Maintenance release 3 was released on July 14. The ODS Graphics procedures include many important, useful and cool features in this release, some that have been requested by you for a while. In the next few articles, I will cover some of these features. Last time I covered
Big data is a popular topic, with multiple articles about the analysis of the same. Today, "Big Data" is measured in multiple of Tera Bytes, and SAS provides special software for analysis and visualization of Big Data - Visual Analytics. When data is very big, it may be meaningless, let alone inefficient, to plot
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
Bubble Plots provide additional ways to visualize your data. The plot supports display of multiple response characteristics of the data in one graph. Bubble plots were introduced with SAS 9.3 in GTL and SG Procedures. A bubble is drawn at each (x, y) point in the graph, and each bubble is
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
MicroMaps are a powerful way to display data where the display includes small, lightweight maps to provide geographical information regarding the data. This geographical information gives clues to the relationship between the data that could lead to more insight. The SAS SG Procedures and GTL do not currently have built-in
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
Sankey Diagrams have found increasing favor for visualization of data. This visualization tool has been around for a long time, traditionally used to visualize the flow of energy, or materials. . Now to be sure, GTL does have a statement design for a Sankey Diagram which was implemented only in Flex for use
In the previous article, I described the process to create a 3D Scatter Plot using a 3D Orthographic View matrix and the SGPLOT procedure. I posted a macro that can be used to create a 3D scatter plot from any SAS data set, using 3 numeric columns, one each for
The SG Procedures do not support creating a 3D scatter plot. GTL has some support for 3D graphs, including a 3D Bi-variate Histogram and a 3D Surface, but still no 3D point cloud. The lack of such a feature is not due to any difficulty in doing this as
Last week a user wanted to view the distribution of data using a Box Plot. The issue was the presence of a lot of "bad" data. I got to thinking of ways such data can be visualized. I also discussed the matter with our resident expert Rick Wicklin who pointed
Significant progress in reduction of Cancer mortality is shown in a graph that I noticed recently on the Cancer Network web site. This graph showed the actual and projected cancer mortality by year for males. The graph is shown on the right. The graph plots the projected and actual numbers
Including special Unicode symbols into the graph is getting more popular. In general, SG procedures support Unicode strings in places where these strings are coded into the syntax such as TITLE, FOOTNOTE. These support Unicode characters and also the special {SUP} and {SUB} commands. This is because these statements are rendered
There has been much discussion on the SAS Communities page on usage of different symbols in a graph. The solutioin can vary based on the SAS release. New features have been added at SAS 9.4 releases to SG Procedures and GTL that make this very easy. With SAS 9.4M1, almost any combination is
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
Last week a user expressed the need to create a graph like the one shown on the right using SAS. This seems eminently doable using GTL and I thought I would undertake making this graph using SAS 9.3. The source data required to create this graph is only the
Often we need graphs that display two or more responses by the same category values. In many cases it is useful to plot both responses on the same response (Y) axis. This can be helpful to understand the data and compare the magnitudes side by side. This works when the scales
A common scenario is where we have a table of multiple measures over time. Here we have a simple example of Frequency and Response by Day. The Response is a linear function of the Frequency, as shown in the table on the left below. The shape of the data is
As Sheldon Cooper would say, this is the first episode of "Fun with Charts". I did not find a cool term like "Vexillology" and "Cartography" is taken by map making, so let us go with "Chartology". Yesterday, I saw a couple of interesting bar charts as shown on the right. I thought
Often, we have data where most of the observations are clustered within a narrow range, with a few outliers positioned far away. When all the data is plotted, the axis is scaled to accommodate all the data, thus skewing the scale. Techniques to handle such data have been addressed earlier
This week I had the opportunity to present a 1/2 day seminar on creating clinical graphs using the SG procedures during an In-House SAS Users' group meeting. I have presented this seminar quite a few times now, and I always learn something. The audience was very receptive, with some people
