I recently read an argument by Andrew Wheeler for using a logarithmic axis for plotting odds ratios. I found his argument convincing. Accordingly, this blog post shows how to create an odds ratio plot in SAS where the ratio axis is displayed on a log scale. Thanks to Bob Derr
Base SAS contains many functions for processing strings, and you can call these functions from within a SAS/IML program. However, sometimes a SAS/IML programmer needs to process a vector of strings. No problem! You can call most Base SAS functions with a vector of parameters. I have previously written about
The Raleigh News & Observer published a front-page article about the effect of wealth and poverty on high school athletics in North Carolina. In particular, the article concluded that "high schools with a high percentage of poor students rarely win titles in the so-called country club sports—tennis, golf and swimming—and
My colleague Robert Allison finds the most interesting data sets to visualize! Yesterday he posted a visualization of toothless seniors in the US. More precisely, he created graphs that show the estimated prevalence of adults (65 years or older) who have had all their natural teeth extracted. The dental profession
The triangular distribution has applications in risk analysis and reliability analysis. It is also a useful theoretical tool because of its simplicity. Its density function is piecewise linear. The standardized distribution is defined on [0,1] and has one parameter, 0 ≤ c ≤ 1, which determines the peak of the
A SAS programmer wanted to plot the normal distribution and highlight the area under curve that corresponds to the tails of the distribution. For example, the following plot shows the lower decile shaded in blue and the upper decile shaded in red. An easy way to do this in SAS
My son is in high school and plans to take the ACT, a standardized test to assess college aptitude and readiness. My wife asked, "What is a good score for the ACT?" I didn't know, but I did a quick internet search and discovered a tabulation of scores for the
Recently a SAS customer asked how to Winsorize data in SAS. Winsorization is best known as a way to construct robust univariate statistics. The Winsorized mean is a robust estimate of location. The Winsorized mean is similar to the trimmed mean, and both are described in the documentation for PROC
As my colleague Margaret Crevar recently wrote, it is useful to know how long SAS programs take to run. Margaret and others have written about how to use the SAS FULLSTIMER option to monitor the performance of the SAS system. In fact, SAS distributes a macro that enables you to
You've probably heard of a random walk, but have you heard about the drunkard's walk? I've previously written about how to simulate a one-dimensional random walk in SAS. In the random walk, you imagine a person who takes a series of steps where the step size and direction is a
