Tips and Tricks
This post is a result of an intriguing question posed by a user on the SAS communities' page. How to create a bar chart where the category is a combination of two variables var_1 and var_2 (each with values of '+' and '-'), and get a X axis that shows each
At SAS Global Forum, and again at PharmaSUG, we had the pleasure of attending many papers and presentations on various topics that included graphs in the power point decks or in the papers. More often than not, the graphs exist along other text, and occupy a smaller part of the screen
At the 2012 SAS Global Forum, one of the questions from a user was about showing the original data used for the box plot. While you can use outliers in conjunction with the box features to get a feel for the data, for some situations you may need to see exactly
Recently I posted an article on this blog on how to create bar charts with log response axes in response to a question by a user. This generated some feedback suggesting that bar charts should not be used with log response axes or with a baseline of anything other than
Getting the axis values just right generally requires some work, and the values you want can change from case to case. One such example was discussed by Dan Heath in his post on custom axis values. Here Dan shows the usage of non uniform axis values using the VALUES option on
Creating bar charts with log response axis has come up a few times in the past few days. Before we look into how we could do this, it would be worth pointing out the considerable opinion in the blogosphere against use of log response axes for bar charts. See BizIntelGuru and
On Friday before the conference, I presented a 1 day "developer led" seminar on SG Procedures and GTL, along with a discussion of new features for SAS 9.3. The experience was very gratifying as all users were now using SAS 9.2, and some were using SAS 9.3. We had a lively
Recently, an interesting question was posed on the previous article on this blog by a reader. Can we use the new DiscreteAttrMap feature to create just a legend with specific entries, with no graph. The question was intriguing enough that I did not wait to ask - "Why?". I just got
Recently, a user asked about creating a Bar Chart of Value by Date, where the dates are displayed on a scaled interval axis. Consider this simulated data set of value by date and treatment shown below. This data set only has one value for each date and treatment combination. We can use the VBAR statement
A recent article in the SAS and R blog was about current winter temperatures in Albany, NY. The temperature data for the recent winter (Dec 2011 - Mar 2012) was plotted on a polar graph. Robert Allison posted an article on displaying the same data as a Polar Graph using SAS/GRAPH . Here is his
A user recently posted a question in the SAS communities forum about how to best display two measures by one classifier using a Bar-Line graph, where the scale of the two measures is vastly different. This got me thinking about various different ways to represent such data. Here are some of my thoughts,
The topic of cluster groups comes up often. By cluster group I am referring to the feature in bar charts where the group values are displayed side by side. With SAS 9.3, SG Procedures support stack or cluster grouping for Bar Charts and overlay or cluster grouping for all other
ODS Graphics system was initially motivated by the need for high quality graphs for SAS Base, STAT, and other analytical procedures. Use of SG Procedures, ODS Graphics Designer and GTL by users too has initially focused on analytical graphs. But just like wheels on carryon bags that started for the specific needs of flight
Creating a graph that looks nice, with readable, high resolution fonts is important and should be easy to do. With SG procedures and GTL, this is easy to do with a simple option, but not the default. Creating a high resolution (image) for a graph consumes higher system resources. When working on a graph,
Most users of the ODS Graphics system have probably had the need to adjust the dimensions of their graph output at times. The ODS GRAPHICS statement makes this easy to do. This statement supports the WIDTH= and HEIGHT= options. If you set just one of these, the system will calculate
The Adverse Event Timeline graph posted earlier used the MARKERCHAR option of the SCATTER plot to draw the AE names. This option places a center-justified label at the marker position. There is no option in SAS 9.2 version to right-justify the label. Hence, we have to compute an offset in data
Bubble plots are often used to display social and economic data as Gapminder effectively does. With the addition of the BUBBLEPLOT statement to SAS 9.3, it is now possible to create bubble plots in SAS with a few lines of code: proc template; define statgraph bplot; begingraph; entrytitle 'Bubble Plot
This classic start to a romantic poem assumes that the correct colors are always assigned to the correct flowers; but, for those who create graphs for reports, consistent color assignment can be more of a challenge than an assumption. This challenge is particularly true for the display of group values.
Here is the promised follow up on the Dashboard graph. In the previous article, I posted the code to create a panel of bullet KPIs displaying three different metrics. For each KPI, I used 5 columns of data which resulted in a wide and inconvenient structure. A more convenient data structure is
In this blog we have been discussing graphs useful for analysis of data for many domains such as clinical research, forecasting and more. SG Procedures and GTL are particularly suited for these use cases. So, when I came upon a dashboard image from Steven Few's Visual Business Intelligence blog, showing the
The graph showing the distribution of the maximum liver function test values by treatment for all participants in a study is commonly used for the analysis of safety data in clinical trials. The data is often structured in multiple columns (one per treatment) as below on the left, or grouped by
The parable of beer and diapers is often related when teaching data mining techniques. Whether fact or fiction, a Heat Map is useful to view the claimed associations. A co-worker recently enquired about possible ways to display associations or dependency between variables. One option is to show the dependency as a node
Here is the second installment of sample graphs from the SG Procedures book - The Adverse Event Timeline. This is a graph commonly used in patient profiles for clinical trials where we track the progress of a patient through a hospitalization event, tracking the dates and severity of the adverse events. The
Recently a user posted a question on the SAS/GRAPH and ODS Graphics Communities page on how to plot the normal density curves for two classification levels in the same graph. We have often seen examples of a distribution plot of one variable using a histogram with normal and kernel density curves. Here is a simple example: Code Snippet:
In December of last year, the book "Statistical Graphics Procedures by Example" co-authored by Dan Heath and I was published. On the back cover, it proclaims "Free Code on the Web". Now, who can resist such an offer? Since most of the examples in the book have very short syntax,
Here are a couple of bar charts showing the city mileage of cars by Type and Origin using the SGPLOT procedure from the sashelp.cars dataset. title 'Vehicle Mileage by Type'; proc sgplot data=cars; format mpg_city 4.1; vbar type / response=mpg_city stat=mean datalabel; xaxis display=(nolabel); run; title 'Counts by Country'; proc sgplot
Recently we discussed the features of the Shiller Graph, showing long term housing values in the USA. To understand the features necesary in the SGPLOT procedure to create such graph easily, it was useful to see how far we can go using GTL as released with SAS 9.2(M3). I got the data Shiller Housing index data
Often it is useful to view multiple responses by a common independent variable all in the same plot. SGPLOT procedure and GTL support the ability to view two responses, one each on the Y and Y2 axes by one independent variable (X) in one graph. Yes, you can also have X
Recently a user posted a question on the SAS/GRAPH and ODS Graphics Forum about drawing a plot with custom confidence intervals . The user has a simple data set with category, response (mean) and custom lower and upper confidence intervals. The data looks like this: Robert Allison provided the code (proc gplot +
Following up on the theme of graphs commonly used in many applications, here is another one that displays a horizontal bar chart with multiple data columns aligned with the bars. Recently at WUSS, a user stopped by asking how to create just such a graph. While this user wanted something more complex
