Tips and Tricks
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 the area of graphical visualization of data, Edward Tufte is a thought leader and has put forth many innovative ideas that enhance the understanding of the information in the graph with minimal distractions and potential for misinterpretation. One of his ideas has been the use of "Spark" plots. As per my
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
Often I have written articles that are motivated by some question by a user on how to create a particular graph, or how to work around some shortcoming in the feature set to create the graph you need. This time, I got a question about Clinical Graphs that were mostly working
Last week I was visiting San Diego for the SANDS conference. I always enjoy this conference as I get to interact closely with the users to hear of their pains and innovative solutions to creating Clinical Graphs. In the conference Ed Barber asked about displaying A1c data along with some
There are many ways to use a heat map. For big data sets, heat maps provide a substitute for scatter plots. Heat maps can also be used to enhance small tables. Several of my colleagues (Sanjay Matange, Pratik Phadke, Rick Wicklin, Chris Hemedinger, and probably others) have posted about using
A few weeks back I posted an article on ways to create a WindRose Graph using SGPLOT procedure. The process is relatively simple. Create (R, Theta) data with both numeric axes where the Theta is a value in the data range is 0-360, and R is the corresponding response value. Then
There was a recent comment on the original 'Unbox Your Box Plots', where a user wants to see the original data for the box, but only label the outliers. As noted in the comment, labeling all the scatter markers and turning on the outlier display is not ideal. But there
This weekend I was reviewing my portfolio of stocks as usual. Yes, I do have a small stock portfolio with a few stocks, and normally I use free stock charting software to review the stock plots. These sites allow you to view the daily stock prices along with many technical
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
There are many situations where it is beneficial to display the data using a polar graph. Often your data may contain directional information. Or, the data may be cyclic in nature, with information over time by weeks, or years. The simple solution is to display the directional or time data
Recently, I needed to view the list of products with the highest number of defects. I have a data set of defects reported against various products. The data set has over 30 products, and each observation contains the product name, name of the primary support person, and other relevant details of
A Turnip Graph displays the distribution of an analysis variable. The graph displays markers with the same (or close) y coordinate by displaying the markers spread out over the x-axis range in a symmetric pattern. Recently, a question was posted on the SAS Communities page regarding such a graph. Here is an example of
Often we see bar charts showing revenues or other related measures by a classifier using a visual of a stack of coins. Such visuals are not strictly for the purposes of accurate magnitude comparisons, but more for providing an interesting visual to attract the attention of the reader. In other words -
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
A Volcano Plot is a type of scatter-plot that is used to quickly identify changes in large data sets composed of replicate data. In the clinical domain, a Volcano Plot is used to view Risk difference (RD) of AE occurrence (%) between drug and control by preferred term. One example 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
Last week I was at PharmaSUG 2016, where I presented a 1/2 day seminar on creating Clinical Graphs using SAS. I was gratified to have a enthusiastic audience of about 28 attendees and we had a great interactive session. I also presented a paper on Clinical Graphs Using SAS. More
CTSPedia is a valuable resource for clinical research "... initiated to form an information resource created by researchers for researchers in clinical and translational science to share valuable knowledge amongst local researchers". This site includes a section on statistical graphs where you can find valuable information and a library of standardized
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
For a long time, Starbucks represented to me as the good coffee cup, with me paying upwards of $4 for a Latte. But on a recent visit to San Francisco, my son introduced me to a few other options. Philz crafts a great cup of java, with the barista making
I have written a new book: Basic 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. This new book complements my other
Returning from my recent visit to India, I was reading an article that included a graph with a series plot where the color of the series itself changed based on the Y response. Now, for sure, the SAS 9.40M3 SERIES plot in the SGPLOT procedure supports color response, but that applies
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 a question was posted on the communities page about creating Box Plots where the width of each box is proportional to the frequency for the category. The comment was that PROC BOXPLOT can create such a graph, but there seems no way to do this using the SGPLOT
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
In the previous article on managing legends, I described the way to include items in a legend that may not exist in the data. This is done by defining a Discrete Attribute Map, and then requesting that all the values defined in the map should be displayed in the legend. In
