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.
Have you ever looked as a statistical graph that uses bright garish colors and thought, "Why in the world did that guy choose those awful colors?" Don't be "that guy"! Your choice of colors for a graph can make a huge difference in how well your visualization is perceived by
In a previous article I introduced the HEATMAPCONT subroutine in SAS/IML 13.1, which makes it easy to visualize matrices by using heat maps with continuous color ramps. This article introduces a companion subroutine. The HEATMAPDISC subroutine, which also requires SAS/IML 13.1, is designed to visualize matrices that have a small
In last week's article about the distribution of letters in an English corpus, I presented research results by Peter Norvig who used Google's digitized library and tabulated the frequency of each letter. Norvig also tabulated the frequency of bigrams, which are pairs of letters that appear consecutively within a word.
While at JSM 2014 in Boston, a statistician asked me whether it was possible to create a "customized bin plot" in SAS. When I asked for more information, she told me that she has a large data set. She wants to visualize the data, but a scatter plot is not
The skewness of a distribution indicates whether a distribution is symmetric or not. A distribution that is symmetric about its mean has zero skewness. In contrast, if the right tail of a unimodal distribution has more mass than the left tail, then the distribution is said to be "right skewed"
It's time for another blog post about ciphers. As I indicated in my previous blog post about substitution ciphers, the classical substitution cipher is no longer used to encrypt ultra-secret messages because the enciphered text is prone to a type of statistical attack known as frequency analysis. At the root
Many people know that the SAS/IML language enables you to read data from and write results to multiple SAS data sets. When you open a new data set, it is a good programming practice to close the previous data set. But did you know that you can have two data
I received the following email from a SAS/IML programmer: I am getting an error in a PROC IML module that I wrote. The SAS Log says NOTE: Paused in module NAME When I submit other commands, PROC IML doesn't seem to understand them. How can I continue the program? The
In a previous blog post I showed how to order a set of variables by a statistic. After reshaping data, you can create a graph that contains box plots for many variables. Ordering the variables by some statistic (mean, median, variance,...) helps to differentiate and distinguish the variables. You can
When I create a graph of data that contains a categorical variable, I rarely want to display the categories in alphabetical order. For example, the box plot to the left is a plot of 10 standardized variables where the variables are ordered by their median value. The ordering makes it
