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.
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
Today is my fourth blog-iversary: the anniversary of my first blog post in 2010. To celebrate, I am going to write a series of fun posts based on The Code Book by Simon Singh, a fascinating account of the history of cryptography from ancient times until the present. While reading
While I was working on my recent blog post about two-dimensional binning, a colleague asked whether I would be discussing "the new hexagonal binning method that was added to the SURVEYREG procedure in SAS/STAT 13.2." I was intrigued: I was not aware that hexagonal binning had been added to a
Last Monday I discussed how to choose the bin width and location for a histogram in SAS. The height of each histogram bar shows the number of observations in each bin. Although my recent article didn't mention it, you can also use the IML procedure to count the number of
When you create a histogram with statistical software, the software uses the data (including the sample size) to automatically choose the width and location of the histogram bins. The resulting histogram is an attempt to balance statistical considerations, such as estimating the underlying density, and "human considerations," such as choosing
My wife got one of those electronic activity trackers a few months ago and has been diligently walking every day since then. At the end of the day she sometimes reads off how many steps she walked, as measured by her activity tracker. I am always impressed at how many
In a previous blog post, I showed how to use the graph template language (GTL) in SAS to create heat maps with a continuous color ramp. SAS/IML 13.1 includes the HEATMAPCONT subroutine, which makes it easy to create heat maps with continuous color ramps from SAS/IML matrices. Typical usage includes
Heat maps have many uses. In a previous article, I showed how to use heat maps with a discrete color ramp to visualize matrices that have a small number of unique values, such as certain covariance matrices and sparse matrices. You can also use heat maps with a continuous color
One of the things I enjoy about blogging is that I often learn something new. Last week I wrote about how to optimize a function that is defined in terms of an integral. While developing the program in the article, I made some mistakes that generated SAS/IML error messages. By
