[…] You can use simulation to create the acceptance intervals, which are the ranges of the first-ranked, second-ranked, and third-ranked (etc.) categories when the categories are selected uniformly at random from a set of size N. In this example, N=40 and there are K=6 categories. You can use the RANDMULTINOMIAL function in SAS IML software to simulate a large number (B=5000) of samples. For each sample, sort the counts in descending order to mimic the method used by the Pareto chart. You can do these two steps efficiently by simulating all B samples into a matrix that has B rows and K columns. You then sort each row independently. …