10 posts from 2018 that deserve a second look

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Numbers don't lie, but sometimes they don't reveal the full story. Last week I wrote about the most popular articles from The DO Loop in 2018. The popular articles are inevitably about elementary topics in SAS programming or statistics because those topics have broad appeal. However, I also write about advanced topics, which are less popular but fill an important niche in the SAS community. Not everyone needs to know how to fit a Pareto distribution in SAS or how to compute distance-based measures of correlation in SAS. Nevertheless, these topics are interesting to think about.

I believe that learning should not stop when we leave school. If you, too, are a lifelong learner, the following topics deserve a second look. I've included articles from four different categories.

Data Visualization

  • Fringe plot: When fitting a logistic model, you can plot the predicted probabilities versus a continuous covariate or versus the empirical probability. You can use a fringe plot to overlay the data on the plot of predicted probabilities. The SAS developer of PROC LOGISTIC liked this article a lot, so look for fringe plots in a future release of SAS/STAT software!
  • Order variables in a correlation matrix or scatter plot matrix: When displaying a graph that shows many variables (such as a scatter plot matrix), you can make the graph more understandable by ordering the variables so that similar variables are adjacent to each other. The article uses single-link clustering to order the variables, as suggested by Hurley (2004).
  • A stacked band plot, created in SAS by using PROC SGPLOT
  • Stacked band plot: You can use PROC SGPLOT to automatically create a stacked bar plot. However, when the bars represent an ordered categorical variable (such as months or years), you might want to create a stacked band plot instead. This article shows how to create a stacked band plot in SAS.

Statistics and Data Analysis

Random numbers and resampling methods

Process flow diagram shows how to resample data to create a bootstrap distribution.

Optimization

These articles are technical but provide tips and techniques that you might find useful. Choose a few topics that are unfamiliar and teach yourself something new in this New Year!

Do you have a favorite article from 2018 that I did not include on the list? Share it in a comment!

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About Author

Rick Wicklin

Distinguished Researcher in Computational Statistics

Rick Wicklin, PhD, is a distinguished researcher in computational statistics at SAS and is a principal developer of SAS/IML software. His areas of expertise include computational statistics, simulation, statistical graphics, and modern methods in statistical data analysis. Rick is author of the books Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software and Simulating Data with SAS.

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