Graphing data is almost always more informative than displaying a table of summary statistics. In a recent article about "dynamite plots," I briefly mentioned that graphs such as box plots and strip plots are better at showing data than graphs that merely show the mean and standard deviation. This article
A statistical programmer asked how to simulate event-trials data for groups. The subjects in each group have a different probability of experiencing the event. This article describes one way to simulate this scenario. The simulation is similar to simulating from a mixture distribution. This article also shows three different ways
A colleague spent a lot of time creating a panel of graphs to summarize some data. She did not use SAS software to create the graph, but I used SAS to create a simplified version of her graph, which is shown to the right. (The colors are from her graph.)
This article shows how to create a "sliced survival plot" for proportional-hazards models that are created by using PROC PHREG in SAS. Graphing the result of a statistical regression model is a valuable way to communicate the predictions of the model. Many SAS procedures use ODS graphics to produce graphs
In a previous article, I discussed a beautiful painting called "Phantom’s Shadow, 2018" by the Nigerian-born artist, Odili Donald Odita. I noted that if you overlay a 4 x 4 grid on the painting, then each cell contains a four-bladed pinwheel shape. The cells display rotations and reflections of the pinwheel. The
This article shows how to estimate and visualize a two-dimensional cumulative distribution function (CDF) in SAS. SAS has built-in support for this computation. Although the bivariate CDF is not used as much as the univariate CDF, the bivariate version is still a useful tool in understanding the probable values of
It can be frustrating to receive an error message from statistical software. In the early days of the SAS statistical graphics (SG) procedures, an error message that I dreaded was ERROR: Attempting to overlay incompatible plot or chart types. This error message appears when you attempt to use PROC SGPLOT
Most introductory statistics courses introduce the bar chart as a way to visualize the frequency (counts) for a categorical variable. A vertical bar chart places the categories along the horizontal (X) axis and shows the counts (or percentages) on the vertical (Y) axis. The vertical bar chart is a precursor
A previous article discusses how to interpret regression diagnostic plots that are produced by SAS regression procedures such as PROC REG. In that article, two of the plots indicate influential observations and outliers. Intuitively, an observation is influential if its presence changes the parameter estimates for the regression by "more
When you fit a regression model, it is useful to check diagnostic plots to assess the quality of the fit. SAS, like most statistical software, makes it easy to generate regression diagnostics plots. Most SAS regression procedures support the PLOTS= option, which you can use to generate a panel of
